Back in 1993, my first anti-euthanasia piece, published in Newsweek, warned that if we legalized assisted suicide, organ harvesting would eventually be included as a “plum to society.” “Alarmist!” my hate mail screeched. “Slippery slope fallacy!” etc. Even those who agreed with my overall critique assured me it would never come to pass.
And yet it did. Conjoining organ harvesting with euthanasia is now deemed so respectable it is even boosted at the highest levels of the medical establishment.
JAMA Surgery just assured us that kidneys harvested from patients killed in hospitals — as happens in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada — work better and sooner. And remember, many of these killed donors were not terminally ill. “Kidney Transplant Outcomes Following Donation After Euthanasia” concludes that organ donation after euthanasia “is a safe and valuable way to increase the kidney donor pool.”
In other words, harvesting the organs of people killed by doctors could be a “plum to society.”
What next? Organ harvesting as the means of euthanasia — which will produce even better organs? Is that hysteria? A slippery-slope fallacy? Perhaps, but it has already been proposed in a major bioethics journal.
Meanwhile, there are repeated calls to allow people to sell one of their kidneys and/or sell their organs after death. Well, if we ever allow that, why would it not also be okay to be paid to be killed and “donate”?
This much is clear: We are far down the road of objectifying the bodies of suicidal people to permit unethical acts.
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