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Jeez, sometimes you go weeks without finding something cool to talk about.
When Maureen and Michael Pekich buried their son following his 1996 drowning, they believed the 29-year-old's heart was inside his body. A few weeks later, though, the Pekiches received an autopsy report that said the heart had been removed for transplantation purposes.
Maureen Pekich said she had given the Center for Organ Recovery and Education -- often called CORE -- permission to recover Michael Jr.'s heart valves, provided the valves were taken through an incision that she knew would be made during the autopsy. But it was critically important to her, Pekich said, that the heart remain in the body for burial.
The lawsuit is partly about whether CORE honored a promise to the family. But it's also about a much broader issue that contributes to the chronic national shortage of organs being donated for transplant: Many times, relatives of someone who dies believe they can't donate organs because a dead person's body should stay intact.
"My son's not complete," Pekich said. "To me, the heart is the soul of the being. That was my son, that was his being."
Her husband, Michael Pekich, added, "If there is such a thing as coming back in an afterlife or something like that, I believe that would be a consideration."
Among those who refuse to donate a relative's organs, such visceral reactions are a powerful force, said Laura Siminoff, a biomedical ethicist at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland.
Sometimes the emotional attachments are linked to particular organs. Siminoff has completed research showing that about 20 percent of the people who agree to donate put conditions on their donations -- usually that the heart and the corneas not be donated. That's because many people still view the eyes as the "window to the soul" and see the heart as the emotional center of the body.
"It's a very common reason for refusing donation -- feelings about body integrity, fears about appearance at an open-casket funeral and feelings that it's degrading a corpse," said Arthur L. Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "Some people have emotional attachments to things like the heart. ... It's one of the things that's hard to tease out about resistance to organ donation."
Resurrection ideas
Often, strong feelings about the sanctity of the body take on a religious cast.
Joseph A. Marsaglia Jr., associate dean of faculty and students at the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science, said many Roman Catholics express that concern, which could stem from the church's past opposition to cremation.
"Christ rose from the dead as a whole body and therefore for us to be resurrected it has to be a whole body," he said.
But that's not the church's position, said the Rev. Ronald Lawler, a Catholic moral theologian for the Diocese of Pittsburgh. The Roman Catholic Church has never said intact burial is necessary for resurrection, he said.
"The church has been constantly aware that lots of people will be buried without all their parts and organs," Lawler said. "People have been blown up in battle, cut up in machines. ... The Lord knows how to replace everything."
The church believes people should respect the body and bury it with great attention, he said. But the church also believes it's an act of love and charity to donate an organ in proper circumstances.
The Catholic Church even accepts cremation, so long as it "does not demonstrate a denial of faith in the resurrection of the body," according to the church's catechism. The church had opposed cremation in the past, Lawler said, because the act was sometimes seen as a rebuke to Catholicism.
Jews and Orthodox Christians have even more stringent regulations than Catholics about how bodies should be handled, but those groups as well as the vast majority of faith-based communities support organ donation.
Still, donation touches on an anxiety about fragmentation of bodies that Christians have debated for hundreds of years.
Religious writers throughout the Middle Ages concerned themselves with the relationships between fragmented body parts and the resurrection of the whole person, according to Caroline Walker Bynum, a religion scholar at Columbia University in New York.
A medieval connection
In her 1992 book "Fragmentation and Redemption," Bynum describes the 12th-century writings of Peter Lombard, who asks a series of questions about what happens to bodies in the afterlife. They include:
What age, height and sex will Christians have in their resurrected bodies?
Will all matter that has passed through the body be resurrected?
What happens to hair and fingernails that have been cut throughout life -- do they return to the body once it is resurrected?
Resurrection was seen as a triumph of the whole over the part, Bynum writes, since the body and person would again be made whole. While this was the religious ideal, there were still fears about fragmentation.
The bloody fragments of prisoners who had been drawn and quartered were displayed on castle walls, an act that symbolized their eternal damnation. Lepers were shunned, in part because their disfigured bodies were thought to represent a sort of living death.
A seeming exception to this loathing of dismemberment were the body parts of saints, which were often divided and placed in shrines across Europe, creating the focal points for medieval pilgrims. In some cases, the bodies of saints were reported not to have decayed, which promoted the popular belief that a saint's body was protected after death in a way that a less holy person's was not.
The miracle of this "cult of saints," according to Bynum, is that these fragmented parts were both holy and synonymous with the whole.
At the root of all this interest in the body was the medieval conviction that personhood was inextricably linked with an individual's body -- an idea that many people today seem to accept.
"While no one thinks that a self is only a body, recent discussion seems to find it difficult to account for identity without some sort of physical continuity," Bynum writes.
Keeping bodies intact is important in some Asian cultures, where organ donation is seen as tampering with the soul.
Organ procurement groups in California are working with immigrant Koreans, Japanese and traditional Hmongs to get a better understanding of their donation attitudes.
Von Roebuck, spokesperson for the California Transplant Donor Network in San Francisco, said donation rates among some of those groups are low, but the numbers change among younger immigrants.
Other cultures' views
Not all cultures have had concerns about bodies being buried with all their parts, said Alan McPherron, a professor emeritus of archeology at the University of Pittsburgh. Retrieving the skull of a loved one, for example, has been a common practice in many cultures.
"Sometimes people would bury the body, wait for soft parts to go away and then dig up the skull to keep," said McPherron, who during his career regularly taught a course at Pitt called "The Archeologist Looks at Death."
Ancient Egyptians placed importance on having an intact mummified body because the soul was thought to leave during the day and come back to the body at night, he said. But they always removed internal organs during the mummification process.
It's impossible to know how the burial custom got started, but fragmentation could have been a concern, said Jeffrey Schwartz, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Pitt.
"If you wanted to guess or speculate on how burial could have started, it may have been to keep the body from being chewed up by scavenging carnivores or other animals," Schwartz said.
Siminoff said people today aren't always sure about their religious leaders' teachings on burial and organ donation. But her work suggests that only a small proportion of the people who finally decide to donate the organs of a loved one regret it later.
In a s
When Maureen and Michael Pekich buried their son following his 1996 drowning, they believed the 29-year-old's heart was inside his body. A few weeks later, though, the Pekiches received an autopsy report that said the heart had been removed for transplantation purposes.
Maureen Pekich said she had given the Center for Organ Recovery and Education -- often called CORE -- permission to recover Michael Jr.'s heart valves, provided the valves were taken through an incision that she knew would be made during the autopsy. But it was critically important to her, Pekich said, that the heart remain in the body for burial.
The lawsuit is partly about whether CORE honored a promise to the family. But it's also about a much broader issue that contributes to the chronic national shortage of organs being donated for transplant: Many times, relatives of someone who dies believe they can't donate organs because a dead person's body should stay intact.
"My son's not complete," Pekich said. "To me, the heart is the soul of the being. That was my son, that was his being."
Her husband, Michael Pekich, added, "If there is such a thing as coming back in an afterlife or something like that, I believe that would be a consideration."
Among those who refuse to donate a relative's organs, such visceral reactions are a powerful force, said Laura Siminoff, a biomedical ethicist at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland.
Sometimes the emotional attachments are linked to particular organs. Siminoff has completed research showing that about 20 percent of the people who agree to donate put conditions on their donations -- usually that the heart and the corneas not be donated. That's because many people still view the eyes as the "window to the soul" and see the heart as the emotional center of the body.
"It's a very common reason for refusing donation -- feelings about body integrity, fears about appearance at an open-casket funeral and feelings that it's degrading a corpse," said Arthur L. Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "Some people have emotional attachments to things like the heart. ... It's one of the things that's hard to tease out about resistance to organ donation."
Resurrection ideas
Often, strong feelings about the sanctity of the body take on a religious cast.
Joseph A. Marsaglia Jr., associate dean of faculty and students at the Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science, said many Roman Catholics express that concern, which could stem from the church's past opposition to cremation.
"Christ rose from the dead as a whole body and therefore for us to be resurrected it has to be a whole body," he said.
But that's not the church's position, said the Rev. Ronald Lawler, a Catholic moral theologian for the Diocese of Pittsburgh. The Roman Catholic Church has never said intact burial is necessary for resurrection, he said.
"The church has been constantly aware that lots of people will be buried without all their parts and organs," Lawler said. "People have been blown up in battle, cut up in machines. ... The Lord knows how to replace everything."
The church believes people should respect the body and bury it with great attention, he said. But the church also believes it's an act of love and charity to donate an organ in proper circumstances.
The Catholic Church even accepts cremation, so long as it "does not demonstrate a denial of faith in the resurrection of the body," according to the church's catechism. The church had opposed cremation in the past, Lawler said, because the act was sometimes seen as a rebuke to Catholicism.
Jews and Orthodox Christians have even more stringent regulations than Catholics about how bodies should be handled, but those groups as well as the vast majority of faith-based communities support organ donation.
Still, donation touches on an anxiety about fragmentation of bodies that Christians have debated for hundreds of years.
Religious writers throughout the Middle Ages concerned themselves with the relationships between fragmented body parts and the resurrection of the whole person, according to Caroline Walker Bynum, a religion scholar at Columbia University in New York.
A medieval connection
In her 1992 book "Fragmentation and Redemption," Bynum describes the 12th-century writings of Peter Lombard, who asks a series of questions about what happens to bodies in the afterlife. They include:
What age, height and sex will Christians have in their resurrected bodies?
Will all matter that has passed through the body be resurrected?
What happens to hair and fingernails that have been cut throughout life -- do they return to the body once it is resurrected?
Resurrection was seen as a triumph of the whole over the part, Bynum writes, since the body and person would again be made whole. While this was the religious ideal, there were still fears about fragmentation.
The bloody fragments of prisoners who had been drawn and quartered were displayed on castle walls, an act that symbolized their eternal damnation. Lepers were shunned, in part because their disfigured bodies were thought to represent a sort of living death.
A seeming exception to this loathing of dismemberment were the body parts of saints, which were often divided and placed in shrines across Europe, creating the focal points for medieval pilgrims. In some cases, the bodies of saints were reported not to have decayed, which promoted the popular belief that a saint's body was protected after death in a way that a less holy person's was not.
The miracle of this "cult of saints," according to Bynum, is that these fragmented parts were both holy and synonymous with the whole.
At the root of all this interest in the body was the medieval conviction that personhood was inextricably linked with an individual's body -- an idea that many people today seem to accept.
"While no one thinks that a self is only a body, recent discussion seems to find it difficult to account for identity without some sort of physical continuity," Bynum writes.
Keeping bodies intact is important in some Asian cultures, where organ donation is seen as tampering with the soul.
Organ procurement groups in California are working with immigrant Koreans, Japanese and traditional Hmongs to get a better understanding of their donation attitudes.
Von Roebuck, spokesperson for the California Transplant Donor Network in San Francisco, said donation rates among some of those groups are low, but the numbers change among younger immigrants.
Other cultures' views
Not all cultures have had concerns about bodies being buried with all their parts, said Alan McPherron, a professor emeritus of archeology at the University of Pittsburgh. Retrieving the skull of a loved one, for example, has been a common practice in many cultures.
"Sometimes people would bury the body, wait for soft parts to go away and then dig up the skull to keep," said McPherron, who during his career regularly taught a course at Pitt called "The Archeologist Looks at Death."
Ancient Egyptians placed importance on having an intact mummified body because the soul was thought to leave during the day and come back to the body at night, he said. But they always removed internal organs during the mummification process.
It's impossible to know how the burial custom got started, but fragmentation could have been a concern, said Jeffrey Schwartz, a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Pitt.
"If you wanted to guess or speculate on how burial could have started, it may have been to keep the body from being chewed up by scavenging carnivores or other animals," Schwartz said.
Siminoff said people today aren't always sure about their religious leaders' teachings on burial and organ donation. But her work suggests that only a small proportion of the people who finally decide to donate the organs of a loved one regret it later.
In a s
