Lawrence Masek

I welcome Lawrence Masek’s response to my criticism of his journal article. I am sorry he didn’t appreciate my perspective, but I take nothing back.

Let’s start with a matter of little importance. Masek claimed I said his article would curl your toes. No, I wrote that I cover articles published in the professional journals because “some” of them would. Whether your digits react to his effort thusly is a matter for you to decide.

As to the substance of his rebuttal, Masek claims at great length that the dead donor rule, which forbids killing for organs, would also prohibit many common interventions in clinical medicine as “suicide.” He writes:

Permitting lethal organ procurement would enable patients to commit suicide by donating their vital organs, but the same is true of permitting lethal palliation and the refusal of life support.

This is verifiably untrue. Dying from a side effect of an ethical medical treatment like palliation is not suicide any more than a patient dying during heart surgery is euthanasia.