Medics push for ‘death by organ donation’

Patients approved for euthanasia should be allowed to ask doctors to kill them by removing their organs, North American academics have argued.

In an article published by The New England Journal of Medicine, bioethicists Dr Robert D Truog and Dr Carter Winberg of Harvard Medical School, and Dr Ian Ball of Western University of Canada, said organs would be in a better condition if removed while a patient was still alive.

The authors called for jurisdictions where organ donation after euthanasia is legal — Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, and Canada — to consider allowing euthanasia by organ donation.

Heart-beat euthanasia

Truog, Winberg and Ball expressed frustration that current safeguards prevented “‘heart-beating’ euthanasia”, where death is “caused directly by removal of vital organs before cardiorespiratory function ceases”.

Truog told US media outlet NPR: “Why would it not be OK for patients to say, ‘I’ve chosen to die by a lethal injection. Isn’t there some way I can help others?’ They should be able to donate organs”.

He added: “I would say a more appropriate framework is that for patients who are choosing to die from euthanasia they could also choose to have euthanasia linked with organ donation.”

Winberg commented: “These are people who are already consenting to voluntary euthanasia and already consent to organ donation. That warrants a new conversation about whether this is possibly ethical.”

‘Body snatchers’

But University of Rochester bioethicist Dr Lainie Friedman Ross warned: “This is asking surgeons to take a living person into the operating room and to come out with a dead person, which I think is murder.

“There are limits to consent. And one of the things we’re not allowed to do is consent to saying that somebody else can just murder you.”

While legal expert Lori Andrews, Professor Emerita at the Chicago-Kent College of Law, said the approach “might give people the image that these are vultures that no longer wait until you die to attack. It does give up visions of body snatchers from prior centuries”.