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| Wesley Smith |
In 1993, my first anti-euthanasia article published in Newsweek, warned that if society ever embraced assisted suicide, we would eventually couple medicalized killing with organ harvesting “as a plum to society.”
So this is where we are morally in Western society: A respected bioethics journal, published under the auspices of the British Medical Association, no less–can bloodlessly discuss changing the law to permit putting patients under anesthesia and killing them by direct organ removal–and there is nary a note of protest.
That is now happening in Netherlands and Belgium, where doctors are on the lookout for mentally ill and people with neuromuscular disabilities who want to be killed and harvested.
An article written by a gaggle of Netherlander doctors and medical professors in the Journal of Medical Ethics, now suggests taking the next step of directly harvesting-to-death sick, disabled, and mentally ill suicidal people (all eligible for euthanasia in both countries) without bothering with the lethal injection beforehand. From the article:
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 (depending on the protocol) could be skipped, limiting the warm ischemia time and 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 being removed, causing death.
Both options are currently legally not allowed
Allow me: There could be nothing more cruel and abandoning to despairing people than telling them their voluntary deaths have greater value than their continuing lives.
Oh, one thing: Pushing society to think that too.
The culture of death corrupts and corrodes societal morality, medical ethics, family relations, and common decency–indeed, everything it touches.
1 comment:
Words fail to describe this horror - which is far worse than anything the Nazis or ISIS have done, because they did their deeds illegally. We, the enlightened ones who condemned them, have made these horrors LEGAL, and as Wesley says, with nary a word of protest. Our culture is indeed imploding into death and hell. Doctor-administered death is nothing but a society-wide murder-suicide pact and people are tripping over themselves to sign up for it.
Well, we keep fighting. The Canadian Association of Physician Assistants put out a press release last week, warbling about the role PAs can play in this hell of Canada's "adventure". I emailed them asking one simple question - "Is there a difference between injecting a patient with drugs to help them to get better and injecting them with poison to kill them?" I actually received a reply, which, although it dodged the question, meant that someone read my email. So I emailed back again with the same question. Doesn't matter if they reply again or not; we can at least make them a little uncomfortable.
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