PhD-Project: Faith-based and non-faith-based views on organ donation in Germany. An ethnographic exploration among three communities.
Inge Fiedler is a PhD Candidate of the Minerva Research Group The Ethics of Exchange: The Law and Regulation of Organ Donation and Transplantation, which will employ an interdisciplinary framework that engages with both the law and practice in the field. Fiedler’s project will relate to the group’s Workstream 2, Religion, Culture and Minority Rights in Organ Donation and Transplantation, which has a focus on religious and cultural diversity in organ donation decisions.
In 2020 the German Parliament (Bundestag) passed a bill, Gesetz zur Stärkung der Entscheidungsbereitschaft bei der Organspende vom 16. März 2020 (“Act to strengthen the decision-making process on organ donation of 16 March 2020”; in force since 1 March 2022), aimed at encouraging the public to declare and record their decisions on organ donation. In light of this recent legislative change, Fiedler’s doctoral thesis will focus on the decision-making processes that people engage in when deciding whether to agree to post-mortem organ donation or not.
Public campaigns that seek to encourage consent to organ donation often use the metaphor of the gift of life and evocative slogans such as “Organ donation gives life”; “For life”; and “Right, important, vital”. These indicate that the decision to donate organs is often normatively framed as an altruistic act. Yet the circumstances under which decisions are made, as well as the reasons for or against donation, are highly personal and individual, and vary greatly even within communities. Biographical experiences, worldviews, customs, and religious and philosophical beliefs all play a significant role in decisions relating to death and organ donation. In her PhD project, Fiedler will attempt to grapple with this diversity and capture the complexity of individual decisions by interviewing and engaging with people from three communities in Germany – Christian, Jewish, and secular – who have made decisions about organ donation either for themselves or for others. She will consider not only the individuals’ perspective(s), but will situate these within the relevant communities and institutions. For this she will engage with a range of actors, from laypeople of these communities to experts involved in community leadership, patient consultation, and hospital chaplaincy.