Will Assisted Suicide Coupled with Organ Harvesting Come to the U.S.?

Once someone is considered killable or supported in suicide, they may become objectified so as to be used instrumentally. Such is the case with people requesting to be euthanized. The idea is that they are going to die anyway, want to die — even as they do not receive suicide prevention — so we might as well get good use out of them such as by conjoining their hastened deaths with organ harvesting.

This abandonment (in my view) is rife in Canada, where in Ontario, a patient approved for a lethal jab will soon receive a call from the organ procurement society asking for their organs. The Netherlands and Belgium also permit conjoining organ harvesting — including of mentally ill patients — with euthanasia.

But that conjoining has not reached the U.S. because no states (yet) allow lethal injection. Still, the assisted-suicide movement wants it.

One of its generals, the bioethicist Thaddeus Mason Pope, has just released a post on his blog urging that ways be found to conjoin organ harvesting with a patient swallowing a lethal overdose — as just occurred in Australia. From his entry:

Only 10-15% of U.S. MAID deaths would even be eligible for donation. And only a subset of those patients would want to die under conditions (e.g., in a hospital) that would permit donation. But at a time where OPOs [organ procurement organizations] are pushing boundaries with DCD [Donation after Circulatory Death] and NRP [Neonatal Resuscitation Program] to maximize numbers, they should investigate how to obtain organs from some of the thousands of annual MAID cases across 14 U.S. jurisdictions.

So, here we go.

What’s wrong with that, Wesley?

Conjoining organ harvesting with assisted suicide or euthanasia gives society a “stake” in sick people being made dead. For advocates of this policy, it doesn’t matter that the donation choice could be the precipitating motive for sick suicidal persons to end their lives, or at least, could influence the timing. If that is what they want, it’s win-win.

Pope’s low percentage statistics are based on assisted suicide being restricted to people diagnosed with a terminal illness. But once we allowed organ donation after assisted suicide of the terminally ill, it would be unlikely to stop there. People who are not dying generally have “better organs,” and so the prospect of garnering even more organs could become a policy justification for expanding eligibility for suicide facilitation to people with chronic illnesses, disabilities, and mental illness, or the reason to switch from self-administration to lethal jabs. After all, once we accept a policy principle, we tend to follow where it leads.

Time will tell if we take the same road, of course. But the question now on the table is whether this instrumental use of suicidal people is what we really want as a society, even if that is what they want. Because if we follow down the path we are currently on, I fear that is what we are going to get.