Campaign Continues to Permit Killing for Organs

Some organ transplant doctors and ethicists continue their campaign to get the people to accept killing for organs. This time the scene is Australia. A transplant physician now says that brain death can’t be known, nor heart death. The answer, obviously, is to kill for organs. From the story:

A DOCTOR claims most organ donors are not dead when their organs are removed. In an article in the Journal of Law and Medicine, Melbourne specialist Associate Professor James Tibballs argues it is “impossible to be certain” that the brain and circulation have ceased “irreversibly” before organs are taken.

“It may be better to concede that, although organ donation is presently conducted under the guise of total brain death, it is in reality conducted under a point of ‘neurological no return’ or ‘as good as dead’,” he said. Dr Tibballs, from the Royal Children’s Hospital, argues discrepancies between legal definitions of death and actual clinical practice lead to ethical and legal problems.

“What perhaps is needed is acknowledgement by the medical and legal professions, and acceptance by the public, that organ donation is presently commonly carried out on persons not actually dead but rather in the process of dying or ‘not completely dead but dead enough’,” he said.

So the bait and switch continues. We were told—and I still believe—that vital organ harvesting is only appropriate when a patient is declared dead by neurological criteria or cardio pulmonary criteria. But apparently, some didn’t mean it, or in the press of the organ shortage, have changed their minds. Now, after years of telling us brain dead is dead, they agree with pro life activists like Dr. Paul Byrne, and say it isn’t so.

But here’s a crucial difference: Dr. Byrne isn’t trying strengthen patient protections, while these advocates seek to weaken them. Because if brain dead isn’t dead, the only ethical answer is to quit taking organs until death is assured. But that is not the game that is afoot. The ethicists pushing this line want access to people who are diagnosed PVS or even, to allow people who are dying or have disabilities to consent to be killed for organs.

But what such arguments from within the organ community really do is undermine the faith of the people in transplant medicine.