The American Transplants Foundation claims that every 10 minutes, another life is added to a list in dire need of a life-saving organ. If this is accurate, that means that by the end of 2019 alone, there would be 524,160 lives waiting to be saved. The American Transplant Foundation also says that every day, we lose twenty of those lives. That is 20 families every day that are told that their son, daughter, spouse, sibling or parent needs a funeral. And at the end of 2020, there would be 516,860 families terrified that they will be told the same, and that doesn’t include the others that had been added to the list. To show you what losing 20 people a day means, 20 people is about half of our class, and that’s just one day. The next day, this class wouldn’t exist. In two more days, or less, the class next us would be gone. In about two weeks, a whole hallway would be gone and that’s only about 300 people.

According to a pediatric site for organ donation, about 2,000 lives on the list in 2017 were under the age of 18. Statistically, 25% of minors in need of an organ are between the ages of 1 and 5. In 2017 that meant that over 500 kids needed organs before they even got to kindergarten. We've all seen those movies where a child is sick in the hospital and it breaks our hearts that nothing can be done to save them. Nothing can be done because they aren't high enough on the list, because they it's so difficult to find a match. If organ donation was mandatory, the list would be shorter and the search for that perfect match would become less of a quest and more of a quick trip to get your life back.

That is the negative side, so here are the positive numbers. For every one organ donator that dies, around 8 lives are saved. Now this number doesn't include the burn victims that need skin to look even somewhat normal. This doesn't include the amount people who will get their sight back due to corneal transplants. The number that includes those lives are 75 to 100. Everything in your body, even your veins can be used to help someone else. Any part of your body could be used to be save that child in the heart-breaking movie. You don’t have to die in order to help either. In fact, in Terry O’Neill’s book “Biomedical Ethics”, they state that as a live donor you can give 3.5 organs. That ‘.5’ being part of your liver. With these numbers, the begged question would be ‘Why aren’t we doing more?’.

O’Neill’s book also has a list of reasons to counter organ transplants, one of these reasons is artificial organs. Though this is a huge development in the biomedical field, it follows the pattern of advancements and is extremely expensive. This is also an extremely unnatural way to survive, especially when we could so easily just give them a new organ. There is also a common belief that doctors, and medics wouldn’t work as hard to save your life if they needed your organs. The American Transplants Foundation counters this by saying “Typically, doctors and nurses involved in a person’s care before death are not involved in the recovery or transplantation of corneas, organs or tissues”. This meaning that there is little likely hood that those trying to save your life knowing whether or not organs are needed is very low.

With all this being said, organ donation should be mandatory after death at all ages. If organs are viable and someone needs them, why would we not save someone? Open casket funerals are still an option, this won’t erase your memory and what is left can still be cremated or buried. To put another family through the same pain of losing a loved one just to put yours in the ground doesn’t seem very just, does it? Not to mention you would allow parts of your loved one to live on through someone else, they would get to be selfless and kind even in death. So why wouldn’t you?