Starkly reminding us that the "Brave New World" is here and now is an article published by a couple of Oxford dons in the journal Bioethics arguing that doctors should start "euthanizing" certain classes of sick people in order to harvest their organs for others.They call it Organ Donation Euthanasia.
In the authors minds, the practice would serve several benefits. It would save lives (though admittedly forcing the premature ending of the lives of others). It would be profitable because hospitals would not have to take care of the sick donor anymore and because organs are a nice source of ready cash. And it would help sell the idea of euthanasia to a heretofore squeamish public.
The article is “Should We Allow Organ Donation Euthanasia? Alternatives for Maximizing the Number and Quality of Organs for Transplantation" and its authors are Julian Savulescu and Dominic Wilkinson.
In this particular article, the authors restrict their argument to patients who are near death. But as Michael Cook points out in this brief Bioedge commentary, the authors have agitated for even more aggressive harvesting methods, like going after those retained by patients in a permanent vegetative state. Indeed, Cook supplies an earlier quote from these guys showing just how far they want society to go to speed up euthanasia and procure more organs.
“But there is another more radical way to increase the supply of organs. We could abandon the dead donor rule. We could for example, allow organs to be taken from people who are not brain dead, but who have suffered such severe injury that they would be permanently unconscious, like Terry Schiavo, who would be allowed to die anyway by removal of their medical treatment.”
