It's Time to Shudder

Wesley J. Smith April 5, 2016 2:04 AM | Permalink

For years, I have documented the growing calls within bioethics and organ transplant medicine to kill the "dead donor" rule to allow live organ harvesting. Over at First Things, I note that euthanasia and organ harvesting have been conjoined in Belgium and Netherlands (and probably soon, Canada).

And now, some doctors for those countries want to skip the lethal injection and kill the patient by removing organs. From the piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics:

The dead donor rule states that donation should not cause or hasten death. Since a patient undergoing euthanasia has chosen to die, it is worth arguing that the no-touch time [the wait between cardiac arrest and procurement] could be skipped...contributing to the quality of the transplanted organs. It is even possible to extend this argument to a "heart-beating organ donation euthanasia" where a patient is sedated, after which his organs are removed, causing death.

I point out that such utilitarianism has been coming on for some time, quoting a 1970 California Medicine editorial calling for trashing the equal value of all human lives and the utilitarian refashioning of our culture into a "biological-oriented society." And indeed, it is coming to pass. I conclude:

We now can clearly discern what a "biologically oriented" society looks like: a culture in which the deaths of the most vulnerable are seen as having greater value than their continuing lives. As Leo Alexander presciently cautioned 67 years ago, "At this point, Americans should remember that the enormity of the euthanasia movement is present in their own midst."

As the great Leon Kass once put it, "Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder."

I’m an organ donor. My fiancee is currently on the kidney transplant list. I’m not a match for him or i would have given him one of mine. I have a close cousin who would be dead right now if she hadn’t been able to get a bone marrow donor.
When my father died, we donated his corneas, and skin for grafts. We weren’t able to donate anything else due to the conditions he died under. We rcvd a letter from the person who got his corneas. I don’t know that I’ll ever be ok to read it, but my mother has and she was incredibly touched.
I’m sure there will be tons of people on this thread about how they’ll never be an organ donor and all sorts of crap like that and that’s their choice. But at the same time, I would bet that this is not something that has ever touched their lives or they would have a much different opinion. Also, I wonder if they have been typed and are on the list to donate bone marrow, as that’s something you can donate without having to be deceased.

At a guess, these proposed donors would mostly be committing suicide for reasons of mental illness.

Degenerative disease and old age are likely to leave organs in poor condition. People dying of cancer are barred from donating internal organs.

So - despairing people - you are worthless while you live, but when you are dead, you can save lives.

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