Is death by organ donation around the corner?

May 20, 2019 by

by Arthur Goldberg, MercatorNet:

A frightening article by Dr E Wesley Ely of Vanderbilt University’s Medical Center, appeared in USA Today early this month in which he asked, “what if we euthanized patients by harvesting their organs?” Or, to make the issue crystal clear, another way to ask the question is: “Can we end a person’s life with their (or their family’s) informed consent by taking them to the operating room and, under general anesthesia, opening their chest and abdomen surgically while they are still alive to remove vital organs for transplantation into other people”?

Although Dr Ely opposes this so called “death by donation” or iImminent death donation”, the scarcity of vital organs has caused US government agencies and international medical conferences in 2018 and 2019 to discuss the ethical implications of approving such a policy. Prior to this debate, and in order to protect severely ill patients from being killed for the sake of their organs, the medical field had adopted the “Dead Donor Rule” which stipulated that donors must meet the legal criteria for death before any vital organ can be taken from their body for transplantation.

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