NAPLES, Fla. (OSV News) — Organ donor registry programs typically offered during state driver’s license renewals might seem like a straight-forward and noble choice but should require greater awareness of pitfalls. They should also offer easier exits from the program.
That was a message that California-based pro-life attorney Alexandra Snyder, CEO of the Life Legal Defense Foundation, brought to her conversation Feb. 7 during the 2025 Legatus annual summit for Catholic business men and women at the Ritz-Carlton in Naples. Some 700 people attended the Feb. 6-9 gathering.
Organ and tissue donation industry was one part of a larger conversation that Snyder offered Legatus during her talk, “Death on Demand: The Current Practice of Euthanasia in the U.S.” But the donation topic is in need of greater public education, she said, given that most people on the organ donor registry do not understand that their lives may be cut short — sometimes by decades — as a result of joining the registry.
Snyder, who advocates for patients and their families facing a wide variety of often complex legal end-of-life situations, gave an example of a 39-year-old Wisconsin woman who suffered a heart attack and became incapacitated. Her fiance had no legal standing to make medical decisions on her behalf but the patient’s next of kin was an estranged mother who lived in another state and recommended life support be removed.
Instead of receiving treatment, the woman was moved to hospice, her nutrition removed and, because she was an organ donor, was on track for having blood flow to her brain severed but kept bodily alive until organ harvesting.
“Her fiancée found us, called us and said, ‘I don’t know what’s happening here, but they’re not feeding her, she’s not getting any nutrition, she’s in hospice. They’re basically just waiting for her to die, but she’s starting to move more and do more things and her eyes are opening,” Snyder said.
The hospice staff allegedly refused to feed her because doctors had said she would “always be a vegetable.”
The Life Legal Defense Foundation hired a Catholic attorney to sue the hospital and doctors to move the patient back from hospice back to the hospital and to resume life-sustaining treatment.
“The judge had to call the doctors, threaten them with contempt of court to get them to move her out of hospice back into the facility,” Synder said. “She was moved back into the facility and I think within a week she was starting to recover, and has since made a full recovery,” Synder told the Legatus gathering.
“If we had not intervened, she would be dead, and her organs would have been transplanted into someone else,” she added. “I’m not opposed to organ donation. I just want people to be very aware of procedures that ensue if you are a registered organ donor.”
Synder pointed out that in the case of a registered organ donor, not even your spouse can override the directives once a donor has opted into the registry. And in many U.S. states all you have to do is check a box when you renew your driver’s license but leaving the registry is not so straightforward in many states.
“There is no other universe where you can sign away parts of your body by checking a box without having any kind of information about what those procedures entail,” she said, adding that in order to get your name off the registry, in some states you have to go get a notarized form, bring it back to the department of motor vehicles or go to the organ donor registry with your notarized form to get off.
“That should be illegal. I’m sorry, I don’t care how much people are for organ donation,” Synder said. “The way you get in should be the way you get out.”
The Life Legal Defense Foundation encourages Americans to be fully informed about organ and tissue donation prior to enrolling, but if someone chooses to be an organ donor, the foundation recommends executing an advance health care directive giving a trusted friend or loved one the authority to make decisions regarding the disposition of your organs in real time and based on medical conditions and prognosis.
In addition, Life Legal Defense Foundation wants individuals on the donor registry to be aware of the growing global market for human skin and other tissue for purely cosmetic procedures. These parts are harvested by organ procurement companies and then sold to processors and distributors.
The organization points to a 2019 exposé on organ and tissue harvesting in the Los Angeles Times which reported that the selling of human tissue is a multibillion-dollar global business and that potential donors need to understand that their body parts may not be used for life-saving transplants, but rather for beauty products or cosmetic surgery.
The agency is calling for complete transparency and informed consent regarding organ harvesting, including controlled donation after cardiac death.
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