Relevant Principles of Jewish Law
In judging cases for organ donation, rabbis apply a range of Jewish principles and consider precedents concerning the donor. These Jewish principles include mutilation of the body, the risk of the medical operation, delaying the burial of the dead, the determination of death, and the duty to preserve or save life. Removing an organ from a body (live or dead) violates several Torah prohibitions. However, as a general rule in Jewish law, virtually all prohibitions are overridden (with the exception of murder, sexual morality and idolatry) if there’s the potential of immediately saving someone’s life. The conditions that need to be met to override prohibitions are: the recipient is at hand and his/her life is in danger, and the donor consented to organ donation during his lifetime.
Read more about this topic: Organ Donation In Jewish Law
Famous quotes containing the words relevant, principles, jewish and/or law:
“... if art speaks clearly about something relevant to people’s lives it can change the way they perceive reality.”
—Judy Chicago (b. 1939)
“[The sceptic] must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge any thing, that all human life must perish, were his principles to prevail. All discourse, all action would immediately cease, and men remain in a total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“There ought to be a law against necessity.”
—E.Y. Harburg (1898–1981)