(NRO) – My first anti-euthanasia column (Newsweek, 1993) worried that once euthanasia became normalized, it would lead to conjoined organ harvesting “as a plum to society.”
I was screamed at and labeled an alarmist. Oh Wesley, people assured me, that will never happen!
Yeah, right. The world’s most respected bioethicists have published serious articles in influential medical journals urging that doctors be allowed to harvest cognitively disabled patients while they are alive — known as ODE, e.g., “organ donation euthanasia” — as a means of cutting transplant waiting times.
That is not yet being done. But as I predicted all those years ago, organ harvesting after euthanasia is allowed in Netherlands and Belgium, and has been performed at least once in Canada.
Now, the Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation — a respectable transplant medical journal, not a nut fringe Internet blog — has published an article proposing beating–heart harvesting as a form of euthanasia where medicalized homicide is legal. Good grief. CONTINUE