‘Faith sustained me during organ retention horror’
Former Wren and mother-of-three Susan Carpenter, who lives with her husband Alan in Norfolk, was giving evidence in an action for fair compensation brought by more than 2,000 families who accuse the medical profession of “unlawfully” taking organs from their dead children without their knowledge.
Mrs Carpenter’s son Daniel was born on September 12, 1985, but died aged 17 months in February 1987 after surgery to remove a brain tumour.
The family found out about the organ retention when they received a letter in March 2001.
The action before Mr Justice Gage in London centres on three “lead” cases involving the removal and retention of organs from Daniel, Rosina Harris, whose parents Karen and David are from the Dorchester area, and Laura Shorter, whose mother Denise lives in the Oxford area.
Rosina was born on October 6, 1995 with “many physical disabilities” and died three days later. Laura was stillborn on October 10, 1992.
Mrs Carpenter said if she had known Daniel’s brain had been retained she would have waited to have his funeral in order to bury him whole.Sally Smith, QC, for the NHS Litigation Authority, has rejected the allegation that anything unlawful had been done in the cases before the court.
Later Mr Carpenter told of the trauma of finding out Daniel’s brain had been removed. He showed the courtroom a picture of his son and said Daniel had been a “real person” and not just an object. “Daniel was 17 months old,” Mr Carpenter said. “He could talk a little bit, he could walk, he liked American football and rugby on the television. He was a real character.
“He wasn’t an object where people could say ‘we’ll have that bit of him’, he was a person.”
The court heard how Mr Carpenter thought the post-mortem examination would only study the site of the operation, and would not mean any organs had to be removed.
