Weird issue of compassion

One of the strange things for me, as a motorcycle rider from California, in Iowa, is seeing all the bike riders on the highways without helmets.

This is about the helmet laws that are in force in many states, but not in Iowa nor any of the other states in a swath that stretches from Idaho to Florida.

Most states passed the law requiring DOT approved helmets on motorcycle riders, ten to twenty years ago.  The political pressure, to pass the laws, came from trauma room medical personnel and families of riders who were lost due to motorcycle head trauma.  Definitely a case of public compassion, maybe not a perfect law because riders were forced to do what they didn’t want to do.

A few years later, the states with high proportions of motorcycle riders, faced the political pressure to overturn the helmet laws and they did.  This time the trauma room medical personnel made little effort to keep the helmet laws on the books.

Why?  Because, by then the trauma group realized that an important source of human organs (heart, liver, kidney, cornea etc..) had been removed by the helmet laws.  Motorcycle head trauma victims are a good source of transplant organs.  Motorcycle head traumas occur at about 10 times the rate from auto collisions.

The compassionate conclusion at the time was: ‘if motorcycle riders insist on dying and becoming transplant donors, on behalf of the recipients, we’ll just have to accept that.'

As I said, weird compassion.’