By Peggy Fletcher Stack - The Salt Lake Tribune - In the beginning Adam gave his rib to create Eve, so the Bible says, and religious people have been donating organs to others ever since.
Many Christians, Jews and Muslims see such donations as selfless acts that fulfill the mandate to love others as God loves them. Buddhists and Hindus emphasize donation as an individual choice, but encourage compassion.
"While some lay members have worried about desecrating the body before burial, these concerns are alleviated when they learn that donation allows for open-casket funerals and will not delay funeral arrangements," said Ben Dieterle, spokesman for Intermountain Donor Services, which coordinates organ and tissue transplants in Utah. "Also, there are no costs to donor families for donation."
More than 1 million Utahns between 16 and 74 have signed up to be organ donors, mostly via their driver licenses. With 66 percent of the population enrolled, Utah is the No. 1 donor registry in the nation, Dieterle said. "But we need to get that extra 30 percent to sign up."
LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City has been doing liver transplants since 1986, while the University of Utah Hospital added its program just last year. In those two decades, there have been 932 donors, of whom only 19 were living, according to the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network.
Currently, there are 104 people in the state awaiting a new liver, either from a living or deceased donor.
Utah is one of a few states that have a Good Samaritan Living Kidney Donor Program, which encourages healthy individuals to donate to a stranger. Since 2003, 29 people in Utah have done so.
The question of organ donation is surprisingly simple for some, Dieterle said. Pope John Paul II summed it up plainly when he said donation is "an act of great love, the love which gives life to others."
