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In 1992, my friend Frances committed suicide on her 76th birthday. Frances was not terminally ill. She had been diagnosed with treatable leukemia and needed a hip replacement. Mostly, though, she was depressed by family issues and profoundly disappointed at where her life had taken her.Something seemed very off to me about Frances’s suicide. So I asked the executor of her estate to send me the “suicide file” kept by the quintessentially organized Frances and was horrified to learn from it that she had been an avid reader of the (now defunct) Hemlock Quarterly, published by the aptly named Hemlock...

I can think of few things that would undermine universal human equality than for society to think that killing despairing people with serious illnesses or disabilities could be a splendid means of incresasing the supply of transplant organs. I warned about this likelihood in my very first foray into anti euthanasia activists in Newsweek, June 28, 1993. From, “The Whispers of Strangers:” Of greater concern to me is the moral trickledown effect that could result should society ever come to agree with Frances. Life is action and reaction, the proverbial pebble thrown into the pond. We don’t get to the...

When Jack Kevorkian advocated harvesting organs from assisted suicide victims in his 1991 book Prescription Medicide, people were appalled.  What could be more dangerous than giving depressed people with severe disabilities the idea that their deaths would have greater societal value than their lives?  Then, when he actually acted on his beliefs, stripping the kidneys of Joseph Tushkowski, a quadriplegic ex police officer Kevorkian assisted in suicide, offering them at a press conference, “first come, first served,” people were stunned.  Who could be so ghoulish? Article Link However, Kevorkian’s macabre notion had turned a key in the deadbolt.  The idea...

Back when I first got into this line of work, I wrote a piece for Newsweek about the dangers of euthanasia consciousness. I was a naif at the time. I had no idea how insidiously seductive the culture of death could be nor how deeply it had already seeped into the culture of the West. Since then, the darkness has spread like a stain.But even then, in my innocence, I was prophetic. Here’s a key paragraph from my first anti-euthanasia piece, “The Whispers of Strangers,” published on June 28, 1993: Of greater concern to me is the moral trickledown...

Amorality of US Kosovo Policy: Friends with the Snake Dec 28, 2010 By Vojin Joksimovich | No amount of human rights violations against the Serbs; no amount of dead Serbs nor any amount of Serbs whose organs are gruesomely extracted by the Kosovo Albanian KLA terrorists is sufficient for Washington to at least re-examine its wrong policy in the Balkans. On April 17, 2008 I published article titled Bankruptcy of Moral Values: Butchering of Serbs Condoned by the West. It was written in response to the revelations in Carla Del Ponte’s book translated into English as Madame Prosecutor: Confrontations with...

Some 911 calls in Manhattan will now bring out two ambulances, one hurrying to the scene and one lagging slightly behind. The first one will try to save the patient’s life. The second one will try to save the patient’s kidneys, in case the first ambulance fails. After months of grappling with the ethical and legal implications, New York City medical officials are beginning to test a system that they hope will one day greatly increase the number of organs collected for transplant. For five months starting Wednesday, the city will deploy a specially trained team that will monitor 911...

October 19, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – As the push for organ harvesting gets increasingly aggressive, and more and more cases of abuse by transplant teams surface, one pro-life leader has developed a card to ensure doctors respect one’s wish to live a natural lifespan.“The card documents that they want to live as long as God gives them,” said Dr. Paul Byrne of the Life Guardian Foundation, who is a pioneer in the field of neonatology and a leading opponent of the notion of “brain death,” which is often used as the point where doctors can begin harvesting organs from dying...

CALGARY, Alberta, September 15, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A group of doctors have called on the medical community to cease harvesting organs from patients whose hearts have stopped pulsating, saying that doctors are misleading families to believe that the patient has died when in fact their loved one is still alive.The story was featured Wednesday on the cover of Canada's National Post. “A longstanding tenet of ethical organ donation [is] that the nonliving donor must be irreversibly dead at the time of donation,” explain the eight paediatric intensive care specialists, writing in Pediatric Critical Care Medicine.The doctors say that the...

LifeNews.com Note: Jennifer Lahl is the founder and national director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network. She has a BSN and worked for 15 years in pediatric nursing, specifically pediatric critical care, pediatric trauma, and transport nursing. She received her B.S. in Nursing from California State University at Fullerton and her M. A. in Bioethics from Trinity International University. Since organ donation became the recommended treatment of choice for many patients with end-stage organ failure, the controversy over the number of available organs for transplant and the solutions to addressing the shortage of much needed organs for those...

In what may seem more like a Hollywood science-fiction plot, as in the forthcoming movie "Splice," lawmakers are trying to prevent scientists from combining human and animal embryos to make "human-animal hybrids." In "Splice," two scientists defy ethical boundaries and splice together human and animal DNA to create a new organism, also known as a chimera.

Should we adopt euthanasia to maximize our supply of available organs for transplantation? For several decades transplant medicine has suffered from a critical shortfall in the supply of organs needed for patients with organ failure.  As a result thousands of patients die each year on waiting lists.  Presently there are over 100,000 patients awaiting donor organs in the U.S.; in 2007 alone, 18 patients per day died waiting for deceased donor organs.  The problem has given rise to significant milestones in end-of-life medicine.  For example, the shift in the 1960s from diagnosing human death in terms of the cessation of...

ABSTRACT There are not enough solid organs available to meet the needs of patients with organ failure. Thousands of patients every year die on the waiting lists for transplantation. Yet there is one currently available, underutilized, potential source of organs. Many patients die in intensive care following withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment whose organs could be used to save the lives of others. At present the majority of these organs go to waste. In this paper we consider and evaluate a range of ways to improve the number and quality of organs available from this group of patients. Changes to consent...

This isn’t the first time that coupling assisted suicide/euthanasia has been suggested as a potential concept, but it may be the first time it has been actively advocated.  Oxford bioethicists Julian Savulescu–for whom virtually anything goes–writing with Dominic Wilkinson argue that euthanasia coupled with organ harvesting would be a splendid way to obtain more kidneys, livers, and hearts. From “Should We Allow Organ Donation Euthanasia?” published in Bioethics (citations omitted): It is permissible to withdraw life support from a patient with extremely poor prognosis, in the knowledge that this will certainly lead to their death, even if it would be...

As I have repeatedly reported here and elsewhere, some bioethicists and others in the transplant community seek permission to harvest patients’ organs before they are dead.  The latest example is in the Winter 2010 edition of Lahey Clinical Journal of Medical Ethics, in which Brown University transplant surgeon, Dr. Paul Morrissey, argues that to obtain more usable kidneys, organs should be taken from neurologically devastated patients without first withdrawing life support and waiting for death by cardiac arrest.  From the article “Kidney Donation From Brain-Injured Patients Before a Declaration of Death:” My proposed model uncouples organ donation from the...

Oldie but goodie from 9/4/09 For the last couple of weeks we have been blasting Cass Sunstein on this blog. Many of you have also picked up the sword and begun fighting this Obama appointment as well. Now, we need to really stand up. The Senate will be coming back into session next week and Harry Reid has already mentioned that he wants to make confirming Sunstein one of his first priorities. We CANNOT let this happen. Check out this story today on Sunstein from Matt Cover at CNS News. If this doesn't make you pick up a phone and...

The Future's Shadow By George Neumayr on 3.18.10 @ 6:09AM Often the politicians who talk about health care the most believe in the Hippocratic Oath the least. Barack Obama falls into this category. He promises that his health care plan will protect the weak and vulnerable. This would be a little bit more credible if his policies weren't already killing and exploiting them. He considers aborting unborn children "health care," has authorized the use of tax dollars for the exploitation of embryos in lab experiments, and his Department of Health and Human Services is now pushing the grotesque practice of...

PEORIA, Illinois, March 4, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - An Illinois senator is pushing legislation that would allow doctors to harvest organs from citizens who have not explicitly given consent for the procedure.The Journal Star reported Monday that a hearing was scheduled this week for Sen. Dale Risinger's bill that would establish a "presumed consent" policy governing organ donation for individuals 18 and older. "This is an important first step to getting a law in Illinois that helps us have more organ donors," said Risinger, a Republican. Risinger said he was open to public input suggesting revisions to the bill, and...

A UN official has urged Albania to stop hampering efforts to investigate claims that hundreds of Serbs were tortured and murdered for their organs in the country during the Kosovo war. Belgrade says the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) abducted up to 500 Serb civilians and took them to neighbouring Albania for organ removal during the 1998-9 conflict with Slobodan Milosevic’s forces. The allegations were first made public in a memoir by Carla Del Ponte, the former chief UN war crimes prosecutor, who said her office had received information about a possible Albanian trafficking network selling human organs abroad for transplanting....

ISRAEL has admitted that in the 1990s, its forensic pathologists harvested organs from dead bodies, including Palestinians, without their families' permission. The issue emerged with publication of an interview with the then-head of Israel's Abu Kabir forensic institute, Jehuda Hiss. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic, who released it because of a huge controversy last summer over an allegation by a Swedish newspaper that Israel was killing Palestinians to harvest their organs. Israel hotly denied the charge. Parts of the interview were broadcast on Israel's Channel 2 TV over the weekend. In it, Hiss said: "We...

Oh-oh: Here they come. For years, organ transplant ethicists and some in the bioethics community have agitated to increase the supply of donated organs. There is nothing wrong with that in the abstract, of course. Increasing the supply would alleviate much human suffering and is devoutly to be wished.  But therein lurks a great danger. Increasing supply is a worthy goal only so long as the organs are obtained ethically. But there is a growing chorus among the medical and bioethical intelligentsia to obtain more organs by harvesting living patients. Yes, some of our most influential voices now seek a license to...