I have been fighting against euthanasia since 1992. All that time, I have been waiting for patient killing to be coupled with organ harvesting. Now it has–in Belgium. Doctors have even taken to the road to promote the idea.
A group of Belgian doctors are harvesting “high quality” organs from patients who have been euthanased. This is not a secret project, but one which they described openly at a conference organised by the Belgian Royal Medical Academy in December. In a PowerPoint presentation, Dirk Ysebaert, Dirk Van Raemdonck, Michel Meurisse, of the University Hospitals Of Antwerp, Leuven And Liège, showed that about 20% of the 705 people who died through euthanasia (officially) in 2008 were suffering from neuromuscular disorders whose organs are relatively high quality for transplanting to other patients. This represents a useful pool of organs which could help to remedy a shortage of organs in Belgium (as everywhere else).
I can think of few more dangerous activities then to convince people with disabilities–and society–that their deaths have greater value than their lives.
January 25th, 2011 | 1:01 pm
Wesley Smith,
What is it, precisely, that you find so dangerous about harvesting organs from euthanized patients? If you articulated your fears, perhaps it could help us evaluate the possibility of safeguards–and to consider whether or not there really is a slippery slope into your worst fears.
January 25th, 2011 | 2:13 pm
Wesley can answer for himself, I suppose, but given that euthanasia is itself wrong, it doesn’t seem to be that hard to figure out why creating an external incentive for more euthanasia is itself worrisome.
January 25th, 2011 | 4:42 pm
I find it disturbing because of the lack of concern for the coercive factors operating on those to be euthanized.
If euthanasia is to be contemplated at all, it should only be done after all coercive factors are addressed. But I see the reverse happening.
And this is why harvesting organs is disturbing. It suggests that, rather than addressing the coercive factors, we are instead adding to them.
We already know that most people who are contemplating euthanasia are concerned about “being a burden”. This is one of the forces I consider to be coercive (since shame and guilt are both recognized elsewhere to be coercive, I don’t understand why they are not recognized as such here – the only answer I can see is that people believe that it’s appropriate somehow to feel ashamed or guilty?)
January 25th, 2011 | 5:15 pm
Blake — it’s a conundrum. According to much worldly wisdom, we’re not supposed to feel ashamed or guilty about the things we do, but we are supposed to feel so about the effect we may have on others due to factors beyond our control. Seems a bit backwards, doesn’t it?
January 25th, 2011 | 9:52 pm
As the mother of one of my retarded patients put it: “These doctors look at my beloved autistic daughter and only can see a potential organ donor”…
January 25th, 2011 | 10:22 pm
C. Ehrlich doesn’t mind euthanasia or organ harvesting? Why not go to Belgium and volunteer then?
January 26th, 2011 | 6:39 am
[...] Euthanasia as a Source of Organs in Belgium Tuesday, January 25, 2011, 12:49 PM Wesley J. [...]
January 26th, 2011 | 6:52 am
Science Fiction writer Larry Niven foresaw all of this in his novella “The Organleggers”.
January 26th, 2011 | 8:52 am
The statistic from the Netherlands – which I recall is uh, close to Belgium and has cultural similarities – is that 1 of 12 euthanised had not given formal permission, nor had their families. Were each of these some horrible breach of compassion? Of course not. Most were hard situations and lost cases. It does illustrate, however, how permeable all those promised safeguards really are. The idea grows up among providers that “well, we technically don’t have permission, but this case is so obvious that it would be cruel not to…”
I can well understand not wanting to be a burden, to contemplate one’s relatives and wish to sacrifice for them, perhaps even prematurely. Organ harvesting already makes that point sharper. This program is certainly one more powerful set of voices saying “We need those organs. Here’s another source that’s not very different from waiting for accidents.”
C Ehrlich, I would note that there is no way to hurry up the deaths of organ donors who die in accidents, but there are ways to hurry up the deaths of the euthanised. Human nature being what it is, when something can be done, someone will do it. I don’t attribute dark motives to any of these doctors, but to all of us generally. Kindly social workers and psychologists already think well of themselves, armed with current buzzwords of “closure,” “peace,” “acceptance” when they can explain to a person what a wonderful gift they will be giving, and how happy they will make some little child, by their selfless decisions. Which is not untrue, BTW. People are indeed more at peace about letting go of life – theirs or a loved one’s – if they believe there is some meaning to it. Yet at this precise point, the difference between comfort, persuasion, and coercion is invisible.
Humankind has a lengthy and sordid history of leaving behind those who were too much trouble. Such a sentiment may even be wired into us, and we are remarkably good at rationalisation.
It is not accidental that many sci-fi writers envisioned utopias/dystopias where people were trained to think how good and natural it is to give up life for the sake of society. It is very close in spirit to our high values of sacrifice, but equally a description of nightmarish callousness. The teeniest twist, hard to capture in legislation or regulation, undoes all.
January 26th, 2011 | 9:46 am
This is the final destination of a post-Christian materialist philosophy.
If there is no after life and no human soul…..why not?
Everything is just utilitarian tissue.
Nightmarish stories like this are blood curdling.
January 26th, 2011 | 9:50 am
“What is it, precisely, that you find so dangerous about harvesting organs from euthanized patients?”
It commodifies human life. Euthanasia does that already, causing doctors to weigh the cost of continued treatment against the economic potential of the patient.
Organ harvesting raises this to a new level. The patient ceases to be a human being and becomes a potential source of spare parts whose economic value greatly exceeds that of the living person. It turns a hospital into a chop shop, with doctors constantly evaluating the cost of keeping the patient alive against the benefits of euthanizing and harvesting him. Human nature being what it is, doctors will invariably find increasingly slim reasons for putting a person to death–particularly if that person is a good genetic match for someone waiting for a transplant.
January 26th, 2011 | 10:11 am
Stuart is completely correct.
Doctors become like vultures scavenging for organs.
Grim Reapers instead of healers.
You might want to stay alive by organ transplantation………but at what cost?
Nihilism turns every positive impulse into a Nightmare.
January 26th, 2011 | 11:01 am
Stuart, your fear here seems to be about the re-use of vital organs. “Euthanizing” in your last sentence here can be replaced with “letting a patient die.” Does the re-use of vital organs from non-euthanasia cases lead to a similar slippery slope? If not, why not? If so, then do you oppose human heart transplants?
Perhaps what also ought fear are exaggerated fears about slippery slopes. Let’s think about these things calmly. Drumming up all this hysteria may hurt everyone in the end.
January 26th, 2011 | 12:12 pm
I don’t think it has to be hysterical. I’m just worried about establishing the link between euthansia and organ donation in doctors’ minds, and how this might affect care recommendations.
1. Doctors note neuromuscular-disabled euthanasia patients give high quality organs.
2. Doctors start to recommend euthansia more in the cases of those patients, either consciously or unconsciously.
I think you can limit worries to the case at hand and still worry.
January 26th, 2011 | 4:21 pm
“Stuart, your fear here seems to be about the re-use of vital organs. “Euthanizing” in your last sentence here can be replaced with “letting a patient die.” Does the re-use of vital organs from non-euthanasia cases lead to a similar slippery slope? If not, why not? If so, then do you oppose human heart transplants?”
Mr. Ehrlich misses the point: these were not voluntary organ donations on the part of people who died naturally, these were organs harvested (nonconsensually) from people who were put to death.
Now, when I die, either in an accident or of natural causes, my organs will be donated to whoever can use them. That’s a big difference from me being in the hospital with an incurable condition, while a doctor looks me over as a potential source of spare parts for some other person. That doctor might wish that I would get a move on and die, but if I don’t, in this country there is little he can do about it. Not so in Belgium and the Netherlands, where doctors have the power to put down patients the way veterinarians put down dogs.
Theoretically, there are supposed to be safeguards to prevent euthanasia from being imposed on those who don’t want to die. In practice, all sorts of coercion is applied, from the psychological to the economic, and ultimately, to just circumventing the patient’s wishes (as a number of studies have revealed).
In the past, the most common reason given by doctors for euthanizing an unwilling patient was purely economic: according to one doctor (who freely admitted what he had done and was not disciplined for this violation of Dutch law), “The patient was going to die soon, anyway, and I really needed that bed”.
To this we can now add a gloss of humanitarian concern to an even more pressing economic argument: “The patient was going to die soon, but if he died now, I could give his liver to this person, his kidneys to those people, his heart to this woman, his lungs to that one; his corneas helped this little girl see again, his bone marrow saved that one from lukemia. And I still really needed that bed”.
The problem is the same as with embryonic stem cell research: what right do we have to put one person to death in order to save one or more other people? Embryos are treated as commodities, and the only difference between them and the terminally ill patients being put to death for their organs is the state of their physical development. It’s a purely utilitarian approach to life, one which treats human beings as objects, rather than as unique human persons. It reduces the value of life to dollar (or euro) figure, and in such a calculus, the weakest and most vulnerable will always be sacrificed to benefit the strong and economically productive.
January 27th, 2011 | 5:26 am
It is arguable that the 1920 book, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwerten Lebens, (Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life) by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche helped to deaden the conscience of a generation.
January 27th, 2011 | 10:04 am
Mr. Koehl somehow misses the point. Nothing in the situation above hinges on the availability of euthanasia. So long as his spare parts can be used for some other person, the doctor can look him over in this way.
January 27th, 2011 | 10:39 am
C. Ehrlich, you speak as though “incentive” is not a reality in this life. I don’t understand why you choose to overlook the very powerful effect that incentives have on behavior.
Yes, a doctor or relative could operate the same purely rational, entirely detached way regardless of whether there were incentives provided that made disposal of said patient or relative more attractive. But people do NOT act that way, so it is pointless to pretend that the existence of incentive has little to no bearing on whether a reprehensible practice is going to occur more or less often.
January 27th, 2011 | 11:03 am
Pentamon, incentives are significant factors. Where do you find me denying this? I’ve simply been asking for a careful and reasonable articulation of the fear that Wesley Smith expresses but fails to explain. If we can understand the particular incentives at work, perhaps we can also assess the possibility of adequate safeguards.
January 27th, 2011 | 12:01 pm
The incentive is that our cultural values portray the giving of organs as good and compassionate, and clinging to life as selfish and wasteful. It’s also considered to be untenable to endure great suffering, so that the relief of pain is a justification in itself for ending life. I’m not sure why Wesley needs to explain the cultural background in which we all live in order to justify his point.
If the giving of organs is good and compassionate, and clinging to life is selfish and wasteful, there are incentives for doctors to use the now useful organs of the now useless body for the “good” of recipients, and incentives for relatives to relieve the patient’s (and their own) suffering in the name of compassion to a potential recipient. This would particularly be a danger in which a progressive disease if “ended” sooner would leave more organs intact and viable for donation, but if allowed to run its course would leave little that remained useful. Natural death (especially that which can be predicted due to progressive disease) frequently involves multiple organ failure — euthanasia would skirt this problem nicely.
But there are some things that are so obvious to those who are marginally aware of these issues that I wonder at your insistence at having this “explained.” I could understand disagreement, but not this need for explanation of the obvious issues concerning the desirability of giving people transplantable organs vs. the necessity of other people to…no longer need them…. in order for that to happen.
January 27th, 2011 | 1:48 pm
“Nothing in the situation above hinges on the availability of euthanasia. So long as his spare parts can be used for some other person, the doctor can look him over in this way.”
Ehrlich misses the point: Euthenasia allows the doctor to act upon his assessment of the patient as parts bin. “Allowing the patient to die” is quite different, and even then could not be done without the patient’s consent. A doctor who failed to provide all necessary and appropriate treatment to extend the life of a patient, absent that patient’s written consent (either personal or by proxy) to suspend treatment would be blatant malpractice.
January 27th, 2011 | 2:16 pm
Now I understand what’s going on. Mr. Koehl is simply deeply misinformed. The discretionary and even “subconscious” behavior of doctors is a significant factor in determining which patients happen to die and when. This is remains true even when doctors don’t actively practice euthanasia. It remains true despite the fact that doctors can be punished for blatant malpractice (it’s quite remarkable that Mr. Koehl regards only the effects of “blatant malpractice).
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