First Their Lives. Now Their Organs.

In a progression that ought to surprise no one, those who advocate for euthanasia are now publicly asking whether they can take the organs of those who are killed by doctor-assisted suicide.

Countries already have a financial incentive for these early deaths, because end-of-life healthcare is almost always expensive. Killing someone at age 60 saves about 19 years (on average) of the most expensive healthcare costs of a person’s life (using the US life expectancy of 79). This is just one of the reasons, and not the biggest one, as to why euthanasia is inherently an ethics nightmare.

In Canada, five percent of deaths are already due to euthanasia. That’s not merely because euthanasia has been culturally normalized, but further because actual health care is difficult to obtain, hidden behind a long wall of extended wait times and suffocating bureaucracies. Moreover, those who are in difficult moments are being forced to decline “offers” of early death from those who are supposed to help them. Doctors can and do make the offer of euthanasia regularly, thus forcing those who are vulnerable to defend their reasons for wanting to live.

The next step, making euthanasia directly profitable via organ donation, is now being discussed publicly. Dr. Robert Truog, a physician and bioethicist at Harvard Medical School, said: “It would be an ethical thing to do because this is something the patients have chosen for themselves.” He co-authored the paper, Contextualizing the Dead Donor Rule in an Era of Voluntary Euthanasia in the New England Journal of Medicine. Hence, this is no longer on the fringes.

But notice the argument: “something the patients have chosen for themselves.” Underpinning so many of the modern medical evils is the concept of absolute self-ownership alongside a total lack of duty on the part of the physician. The doctor is no longer an agent of medicine, but a mere executor of the will of the patient, however absurd, evil, or even non-medical those desires are.

The same philosophical principle is appearing elsewhere in medicine. The transgender saga likewise centers around consent, the highest value in pagan Rome now being embraced in the decaying West. On that basis, we can remove healthy reproductive organs, produce surgically created wounds that must be kept open with lifelong dilators, and even kill people, so long as they consent. When we accepted that basis for morality, then we necessarily found ourselves on a bottomless slope, waiting for the next exclamation of the reductio ad absurdum. The medical industry has not been short of ideas.

In fact, NPR quotes Dr. Truog promoting these organ donations under the auspices of altruism:

“They have very generously thought: ‘How might my death help other people?’ It’s a very altruistic, generous thing to do.’”

So let us ponder the person who lacks family and support, and who is suffering in a hospital. Instead of focusing on assisting him, his doctor suggests that euthanasia is an option, and describes it as a common choice for people in this position. (That’s what happened to the 79-year-old Canadian priest who was in the hospital for a hip fracture.) Then, let us imagine that the doctor goes on to herald this choice as a great act of charity, because the patient could help save lives by surrendering his own and choosing to donate his organs. That is the reality that some people would like to actualize.

It forces the sick patient, who is likely in pain, to justify his own existence, and then pit his life against the lives of others. It incentivizes him to choose his own death when he simply needed support. Those who work in hospitals already describe organ procurement specialists as being reckless and aggressive with regard to how they often pressure families. In this posited reality, they could exert the same pressure on the vulnerable patients themselves.

Ultimately though, Truog is right that “denying them that option doesn’t seem to make any sense,” which is to say that if we accept the foundational philosophical argument that people should be able to kill themselves, and that doctors should be able to assist them, it is just a matter of time before the organs are for sale too. It will look even more grotesque than current euthanasia methods. Surgeons will murder people by taking their organs while they are still alive, killing them. But functionally, it’s the very same evil.

We do not own ourselves, for we are not self-created, and we are not mere matter. We are stewards of our lives, each with callings from our Creator. Our suffering has meaning and can be a cause of growth and redemption. We are more than the pain that envelops us in dark moments, and it is the duty of every man of Faith to help others to see that. What we are witnessing in secular society is the consequence of a worldview that is antithetical to human life and human flourishing, for it does not know of man’s true calling.