Not sure if even the classic horror movies went this far, but three doctors are pushing a plan that would kill people by taking their organs for transplant.
Of course it would be all right because the victims would have requested euthanasia anyway.
A report from LifesiteNews said the doctors, from Canada where euthanasia is routinely imposed and commonly recommended as a health care treatment, wrote a paper, “Contextualizing the dead donor rule in an era of voluntary euthanasia,” in the New England Journal of Medicine.
It is Drs. Ian Ball, Carter Winberg and Robert Truog who said, “In death by organ donation, the patient’s authorization, experience, and outcome are not altered by whether death occurs moments before or during organ retrieval.”
The claim, “Voluntary euthanasia creates a new ethical context, complicating the DDR and established approaches to organ donation: patients are not yet dead, but their death is imminent and results directly from voluntary medical intervention. The current legal reality of voluntary euthanasia provides a new context for interpreting the Don’t Kill Rule.”
The “moral significance” of waiting until a donor is dead before taking organs suddenly “is diminished,” they concluded.
“Ethical focus should therefore shift away from identifying a precise moment of biologic death and toward respecting patients’ autonomous decisions, ensuring that safeguards against coercion and exploitation are robust and advocating for a transparent and publicly accountable process,” the authors said.
Death-by-organ-donation, the actually ending of someone’s life by harvesting their organs, now is illegal in Canada.
But taking organs from the still-loving-but-not-for-long patients would help humanity, they claim.
Pro-life Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis differed.
“Reports of proposals to retrieve organs from MAiD patients before death raise profound ethical questions that Canadians should not dismiss,” she said. “These discussions underscore the importance of maintaining clear safeguards and ensuring that organ donation never compromises the value we place on human life.”
The report noted widespread concern about the idea.
“Bioethicist and assistant professor at the University of Toronto Kerry Bowman was cited as telling local media that the practice is ‘very problematic,’” the report said.
“We have enough challenges in this country right now with (MAID, or medical assistance in dying, assisted suicide),” he said, adding “I would argue this is an unnecessary distraction at a difficult time.”
