Euthanasia Turning Suicidal People into ‘Kill and Harvest’ Natural Resource

This article was published by National Review online on December 13, 2024.

By Wesley J Smith

In the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and Canada, people who want euthanasia can become organ donors. (A recent report in Spain showed that 13 percent of those euthanized donated organs.) Let’s call it “kill and harvest,” a policy heartily approved by our ever more crassly utilitarian medical establishment.

Indeed, a recent study in JAMA Surgery applauds procuring the kidneys of the euthanized because, after five years, the organs of those killed by doctors and then transplanted have worked well — even better than kidneys donated by people after brain death. From the conclusion of the study, which discusses donation after circulatory death from euthanasia (DCD-V):

This study found that DCD-V kidney transplantation yielded a lower incidence of DGF [delayed graft function] compared with DCD-III kidney transplantation [controlled circulatory death after removing life support] and yielded long-term results similar to those of DCD-III and DBD [donation after brain death] kidney transplantation. The findings suggest that DCD-V is a safe and valuable way to increase the kidney donor pool.

Yes, DCD-V, or kill and harvest, is now its own category in organ-transplant medicine.

This is so disheartening.

Allowing kill and harvest represents to me a collapse in organ-transplant ethics. The dead-donor rule is supposed to prevent people from being killed for their organs. Letting suicidal people who qualify for euthanasia know that they can become organ donors comes perilously close to doing precisely that, and in some cases, donating has been a factor in choosing when to be euthanized. Among the serious problems of this approach: 

• People who ask for euthanasia almost never receive suicide-prevention services, and instead, may be contacted by organ-donation organizations asking for their organs. This is a profound failure of true compassion and a form of abandonment, particularly since the ability to donate could become the tipping point on wanting to become dead.
• Perceiving the suicidal who want euthanasia as organ donors can lead to their objectification because obtaining or donating the organs can become the paramount consideration rather than their personal well-being.
• Many, perhaps most, of those killed and harvested are not terminally ill. Some of the mentally ill euthanized in the Netherlands and Belgium (and soon, in Canada) are mentally ill but physically healthy. In other words, the only reason they are dead is they were subjected to voluntary homicide.
• Hospitals are turned into killing centers because the euthanasia followed by harvesting must usually take place in a hospital adjacent to the surgical suite where the organs will be procured.
  

Where will this go next? Well, why not live harvesting as the means of euthanasia? After all, the patient wants to die and this could lead to even more viable organs! And don’t call me an alarmist. Killing by organ harvesting is already being discussed in organ-transplant medicine and bioethics journals.