Peter Kormos, the veteran Ontario NDP MPP member for Niagara Centre, is once again trying to sell the dangerous idea of Ontario organ donors automatically becoming organ donors unless they opt out. What’s not readily understood is that your body’s got to be alive in order to make most organ donations. Viable organs cannot be taken from a corpse. As aToronto Star reader wrote recently: “We are not vampires.”

No one doubts that Kormos means well, but we cannot hurry to kill someone in order to save someone else. Opting in or out alternatives are a doorway to abuse, like when firms send you something unsolicited, bill you and tell you to send it back if you don’t want it.

Another writer complained about incomplete statistics that were used to gain support for presumed consent regarding organ donations and wanted to know: “How many died within the first year after receiving their donated organs? How many suffered severe complications from the procedure? The Star poll said 58 per cent of Ontario residents were against automatically becoming organ donors unless they opted out. Only 40 per cent said “Yes.” One per cent didn’t know.

Medical authorities say there is a very limited window of time in which a transplant can be successfully done. That is why Communist China is such a great market for fresh products from recently executed Falun Gong members and other dissidents.

“Brain dead” is another misnomer given to us by the same people who gave us “choice,” instead of “the killing of an unborn baby.”

We read in Meghan Hurley’s excellent Winnipeg Free Press story (June 18) that Lori Ross, a women who had polio, was declared brain dead 10 years ago in a hospital there. Today, she holds down a job and is speaking out against how doctors underestimate the quality of life of people with disabilities. After only four hours at the hospital, Lori’s parents were told she was brain dead and wouldn’t recover. Her parents wouldn’t accept that and a lawyer from the Independent Living Resource Centre, where Ross currently works, acted in her defence.

The hospital kept her on life support and she soon became conscious and slowly began to recover. A Canadian Medical Association spokesman said recently that the criteria for determining whether a patient is brain dead have drastically changed over the last 10 years. Their anxiousness to market fresh, valuable body parts is why they’re in a hurry to declare patients dead – and I don’t think that has changed.

Kormos’s idea of implementing a law that if people don’t say “no” they mean “yes” is jumping to wrong-headed conclusions. Kormos buys the NDP fallacy that it’s okay to kill someone in order save someone, which is also the NDP position on aborting babies, which he feels should be a women’s “choice.”

I will never sign an organ donor card, because I don’t trust the medical profession – not that anybody in their right mind would be interested in shopping my body parts.

If I did sign a card saying “no” to shopping my body parts, how could I (or anybody else) be guaranteed that playful doctors gathered around my body would be making an airplane out of the card? They might be saying: “What card? I didn’t see any card.” If I had ‘No cannibalizing my body!’ tattooed on my forehead, they might miss that, too.

After all, any profession that condones killing unborn babies in the womb and is now leaning towards executing the elderly, the sick and the handicapped might consider me akin to last week’s newspaper or maybe last month’s newspaper: disposable. Yes, I’d have trouble giving my ready assent to them, especially if I was temporarily or permanently in a comatose state.

(That doesn’t mean I don’t have great respect for my medical doctor and, if by chance he should read this column, I want him to know this. Whew!)

If any reader thinks I’ve got it in for the Pink Peoples’ Party, banish the thought. I was an active member in my reckless youth in the CCF and the NDP, fought in their campaigns, attended their conventions, including the one that changed the name to the New Democratic Party (originally briefly called the New Party). I was also the treasurer of the Parkdale CCF Riding Association, where members said of me: “He’s incompetent, but he’s honest.”