Doctors Call for Patients to Be Killed for Their Organs
by Frank Bergman
A group of leading medical professionals has provoked widespread concerns after proposing that doctors should be allowed to kill their patients in order to harvest their body parts through a process they call “death by organ donation.”
The bone-chilling call was made in a new article published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The article, titled “Contextualizing the Dead Donor Rule in an Era of Voluntary Euthanasia,” was written by Harvard University’s Dr. Robert Truog and colleagues.
The authors argue that the medical system has already redefined death to support modern organ harvesting practices.
They now say “death by organ donation” should be viewed as the next step.
At the center of the debate is the Dead Donor Rule.
The rule is supposed to be one of the basic ethical limits protecting patients.
It says patients must be dead before their organs are removed and that doctors must not cause death by procuring organs.
That rule is meant to preserve public trust in the transplant system.
But Truog and his colleagues argue that the rule has already become flexible.
“Though the DDR is considered the ‘ethical linchpin’ of transplantation, it has thus functioned less as a moral absolute than as a moral anchor, whose application requires ongoing interpretation and adaptation,” the authors wrote.
The argument is stunning.