How India countered beliefs that hold back organ donation – by rallying spiritual leaders to promote life-saving practice
As in Hong Kong, followers of country’s major religions believe a body must be ‘whole’ for funeral rites, but doctors’ summit with religious leaders has helped change attitudes and save some of the 500,000 patients awaiting transplants
When doctors told Sunil and Kiran Shah their infant son Somnath was brain-dead, they had no idea what it meant. Uneducated and poor, they assumed the doctors could treat the “condition”. After all, it didn’t seem serious – the 14-month-old had been playing at home in Surat, in Gujarat state, when he simply slipped and hit his head.
The distraught parents were at their son’s hospital bedside when Nilesh Mandlewala, head of the Donate Life NGO in Surat, walked in to ask them a delicate question: would they offer Somnath’s organs?
“This was the youngest child I had dealt with. I had to explain what brain-dead meant, that their son would never be all right, that being brain-dead was equal to death, but that they could give new life to another child,” said Mandlewala.
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After consulting relatives, the bewildered parents agreed, making Somnath one of the youngest donors in the country. The moment Kiran Shah said “yes”, Mandlewala bent down to touch her feet in gratitude.
“If my baby could not survive, I knew I could not refuse the chance to save another child,” Kiran Shah said.
Hindus and Muslims, for example, believe the body should be “whole” at the time of cremation for funeral rites to be conducted properly. The idea of transplanting an organ from a corpse into another body is also seen by some Hindus as “impure”.