Colby's Legacy: Inspiring Organ Donation Awareness

In the early 1990s, medical personnel’s fruitless attempts to save one-year-old, Colby Cassani’s, life were no match for the asphyxiating bath water that engulfed his lungs (The Colby Foundation, 2013). However, Colby’s parents refused to allow their son’s tragic death to be a mere disastrous event when they agreed to give his organs away and ensured the perseverance of his memory in the three lives that he saved (The Colby Foundation, 2013). Moreover, Colby’s contributions through his premature death inspired twenty years of organ donation awareness with a non-profit organization that his parents named after him (The Colby Foundation, 2013). While over one hundred thousand people are currently in desperate need of an organ transplant, nearly

While people who offer parts of their bodies to others after death may not necessarily give their families much financial comfort, those who volunteer their bodies to medical schools for practice and research are typically able to cut down their funeral expenses significantly (Wellington & Sayre, 2011). However, Wellington and Sayre (2011) theorize that the decrease in entombment prices may also depreciate the number of individual parts donations, but their studies reveal no support to this assumption. Even if the donations of cadavers did overpower those of separate organs, these bodies would allow medical students to gain more information about unfamiliar diseases that would help eliminate the time and money that a patient would spend on futile methods of treatment (Wellington & Sayre, 2011; Minz, Kashyap, & Udgiri, 2003). Furthermore, live donors are able to help others without the subjection to financial burden (Wellington & Sayre, 2011). While profits from organ donations are morally wrong in the eyes of humanity and illegal due to the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984, many states enable live donors to gain thousands of dollars in compensation on their tax returns and recruit state workers with up to a month of reimbursement while they are in recovery (Wellington & Sayre, 2011). Ultimately, the ethical concerns that involve the monetary motivations for organ donations still favor society as a whole because it allows patients with fatal illnesses to receive the mandatory procedures to save their