organ harvesting

Good motives sometimes lead to terrible places. Such is the case with the understandable desire to increase the organ supply, which for years has tempted some bioethicists to stretch the ethics of transplant medicine beyond the breaking point.

Now, in the New York Times, three doctors promote the idea of “redefining death” to allow patients to be killed for their organs. First, the authors lament the difficulty of obtaining healthy organs from people whose hearts stop irreversibly after the removal of life support. They also bemoan the shortage of “brain-dead” donors. Then, after discussing a controversial approach that restarts circulation after cardiac arrest (but not to the brain) — which I have posted about before — they get down to the nitty-gritty of redefining death. From “Donor Organs Are Too Rare. We Need a New Definition of Death“:

The solution, we believe, is to broaden the definition of brain death to include irreversibly comatose patients on life support. Using this definition, these patients would be legally dead regardless of whether a machine restored the beating of their heart.

So long as the patient had given informed consent for organ donation, removal would proceed without delay. The ethical debate about normothermic regional perfusion would be moot. And we would have more organs available for transplantation.

Back in 1993, my first anti-euthanasia piece, published in Newsweek, warned that if we legalized assisted suicide, organ harvesting would eventually be included as a “plum to society.” “Alarmist!” my hate mail screeched. “Slippery slope fallacy!” etc. Even those who agreed with my overall critique assured me it would never come to pass. And yet it did. Conjoining organ harvesting with euthanasia is now deemed so respectable it is even boosted at the highest levels of the medical establishment. JAMA Surgery just assured us that kidneys harvested from patients killed in hospitals — as happens in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada — work better and sooner. And remember, many of these killed donors were not terminally ill. “Kidney Transplant Outcomes Following Donation After Euthanasia” Read More ›

For years, members of the Falun Gong, a new religious movement, have accused China of tissue-typing and organ-harvesting their fellow practitioners to boost the country’s black market and further the Chinese Communist Party’s tyrannical suppression of the FG movement. China has denied the accusation repeatedly, but multiple international studies and exposés have substantiated the brutality with strong circumstantial evidence. Now, an escaped Falun Gong member has come forward with direct evidence, claiming that part of his own liver and one lung were harvested while he was a political prisoner in 2004. From the Epoch Times story: A man who had part of his liver forcibly removed in communist China has stepped forward after escaping the country to draw attention to the Chinese regime’s mass killing-for-profit scheme known as forced Read More ›