Euthanasia and Organ Donation: When Death Becomes a Medical Resource

No one envies Karen Duncan her diagnosis.

Motor Neuron Disease attacks the body’s nerve cells, and in Duncan’s case, it was doing so quickly. Her muscles ached and cramped; then she had to walk with a cane; then she had to motor around in a wheelchair; meanwhile, she stopped being able to trust her thoughts and emotions. Her prognosis wasn’t good either: things would get progressively worse, she would eventually be paralyzed, and then she would die.

So Duncan did what anyone steeped in our modern liberal moral worldview might do. She took a pill to end it all, joining the more than 3,000 Australians who opt to do so every year under the nation’s assisted dying policies. Thirty-nine minutes later, doctors wheeled her out of her hospital room to remove her lungs, kidneys, a heart valve, and some eye tissue. If you’re starting to feel like there might be some ethical issues here, don’t worry — according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Duncan felt “no pressure at all.”

The fact is, euthanasia was never compassionate or moral, and coupling it with organ donation makes that glaringly obvious.

Duncan’s case was unique only because no one had self-administered poison and then donated her organs before. A handful of patients in Australia opting for assisted suicide procedures have donated their organs in the last few years (since the first case in 2023), but in all those cases doctors had injected the murderous drug directly into patients’ veins — when the doctor is the one doing it, he can control exactly how dead his patient is before he attempts to harvest her organs.

Combining organ harvesting with assisted suicide is a relatively new phenomenon, although it’s technically not illegal in places like the Netherlands (which effectively spearheaded the whole euthanasia movement), Belgium, Spain, and Canada. If you don’t think too hard about it, it doesn’t seem like the worst idea ever. After all, these people were already going to commit suicide; now they’re generously helping other people live.

Except, it’s not quite that simple. It’s not like we’re going to just keep patiently waiting for women like Duncan to die 39 minutes after they’ve ingested a pill. We need quality organs, and the best way to get those is to cut them out of living bodies.

Then, last month, several doctors proposed a solution in the New England Journal of Medicine: patients hoping to die “with dignity” should be able to opt to do so via organ donation. Essentially, these “doctors” are proposing that they kill their patients on the operating room table by cutting valuable organs out of their bodies. “It would be an ethical thing to do because this is something the patients have chosen for themselves,” one of the paper’s authors insisted. “They have very generously thought: ‘How might my death help other people?’ It’s a very altruistic, generous thing to do.”

There are, of course, several moral issues wrapped up in all of this.

Obviously, there’s the moral question of euthanasia itself. Liberal morality functions off the premise that individuals should be radically free to make choices having to do with their person. Want to have sexual relations with someone? Just make sure everyone is consenting. How about suicide? Well, as long as you consent, everything is just fine. Things only become hairy when the individual loses control over his own body, or when he’s not capable of consent.

Traditional morality functions on something far less subjective than individual whims. In the case of suicide, for instance, Thomas Aquinas assures us that, while “man is made master of himself through his free-will,” that mastery doesn’t extend to his life “because life is God’s gift to man, and is subject to His power, Who kills and makes to live.”

It’s not that consent doesn’t exist, but that it’s not the objective standard by which all actions are measured.

This is the primary problem with euthanasia programs. Yes, it’s true that patients of certain demographics are being coerced into opting for medical suicide — that’s an abuse under any moral standard — but like it or not, suicide is simply objectively wrong. There’s not really an out for that.

There’s also the issue of organ donation. Usually, patients must be dead before any organs are harvested — but how do you define death? If you wait until the heart stops, organs are frequently completely useless.

So in 1968, a group of Harvard doctors came up with brain death, in part because they needed organs. The question, in the words of Henry Beecher, one of those Harvard doctors, was simply this: “can society afford to discard the tissues and organs of the hopelessly unconscious patient when they could be used to restore the otherwise hopelessly ill, but still salvageable individual?”

To be clear, when a patient is considered brain dead (i.e., his brain activity has totally and irreversibly ceased), his heart is still beating, he might be breathing, excreting waste, and even healing from infection. As it turns out, irreversible brain death is rather difficult to ascertain. In recent years, there have been multiple cases of patients who were considered brain dead, were being prepared for organ donation, managed to come out of it just in time, and made a full recovery. All of this, of course, makes one wonder whether that 1968 determination might just be a bit faulty.

Lest you think this is all just some ghastly mistake, it’s not like the medical industry doesn’t make money when it transfers organs from one patient to another. One financial analysis found that the total profit for the medical industry in the United States from a typical deceased organ donor might be as high as $1.3 million. With that in mind, why wouldn’t the doctors writing for the New England Journal of Medicine want more organ donors? Especially if the organs are going to be in pristine condition?

The fact is, euthanasia was never compassionate or moral, and coupling it with organ donation makes that glaringly obvious. These “doctors” are trying to feed patients into a supply chain with the excuse that there’s a consent form attached, so it must be moral. But what else could we expect in a world where morality is determined by individual whim?

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