Killing For Organs Promoted in the New York Times Magazine

Sunday, December 20, 2009
Wesley J. Smith

As I have often warned, the next big agenda item in organ transplant medicine is gaining license for transplant surgeons to kill the cognitively devastated and imminently dying patients for their organs. Such a policy is pushed from two different angles, both of which try to convince us that killing for organs would really be a case of no harm, no foul. First, they argue that if one is only “biologically alive,” e.g., in persistent vegetative state, the rational part that makes them human is gone,–and so it is perfectly proper to treat as if they were dead. The second main argument is that death is a process, and since we cannot know the exact moment when life actually ceases, we do no harm in allowing surgeons to hasten the time in cases where a patient is thought to be actively dying.

A physician named Darshak Sanghavi pushes the second argument in today’s piece in the Times Magazine. Ostensibly, the article is about Donation After Cardiac Death (DCD), that is patients who are allowed to go into cardiac arrest in an operating room after the removal of life support, and after five minutes without heart beat or respiration declared dead. (We have also discussed this often at SHS.) Then, the organ procurement team takes over the patient’s care and removes the organs. the rest