Killing For Organs Promoted in the New York Times Magazine
By Wesley J Smith, First Things
As I have often warned, the next big agenda item in organ transplant medicine is gaining license for transplant surgeons to kill the cognitively devastated and imminently dying patients for their organs. Such a policy is pushed from two different angles, both of which try to convince us that killing for organs would really be a case of no harm, no foul. First, they argue that if one is only “biologically alive,” e.g., in persistent vegetative state, the rational part that makes them human is gone,–and so it is perfectly proper to treat as if they were dead. The second main argument is that death is a process, and since we cannot know the exact moment when life actually ceases, we do no harm in allowing surgeons to hasten the time in cases where a patient is thought to be actively dying.
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