I have an article in the Center for Bioethics and Culture (CBC) newsletter about the continuing effort by many within the Medical Intelligentsia to redefine death toward the end of expanding the organ donor pool. From my column:
For years, organ transplant ethicists and some in the bioethics community have agitated to change the definition of death from a purely biological determination, to one based in utilitarianism and desired sociological narratives. Why mess with death? Too few organs are donated for transplant, leading to long waiting lines and the deaths of some people who might be saved were organs more readily available.
But why redefine death? The point of this reckless advocacy — although they don’t put it this bluntly — is that there are thousands of perfectly good organs being used by people who really don’t need them anymore, by which they mean patients with profound cognitive impairments who will remain unconscious or minimally aware for the rest of their lives. Why not harvest such patients, this thinking goes, for the benefit of people who could return to normal lives?
I go over the recent editorial in Nature calling for a loosening of the definition of death and the similar article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, both of which I have discussed here. I conclude:
It is important to stress that doctors are not currently harvesting the organs of people in PVS, and surely most would never do so. But that doesn’t mean it can’t happen here. Richard John Neuhaus once wrote, “Thousands of medical ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable, until it is finally established as the unexceptionable.”
That process is steaming full speed ahead in the related fields of organ transplantation and biotechnology. The only way to stop this dehumanizing agenda is to take notice and push back before it is too late. Some things should ever and always be unthinkable.
This is an important drum, and I am going to continue to pound it.
October 14th, 2009 | 6:26 pm
I’m in agreement with you, Wes — Dr. James Bernat of Dartmouth came and spoke to us at Albany Medical Center and showed that fMRI technologies are showing that ‘persistent vegetative state’ is not always clear cut — that there is more of a continuum and that some ‘PVS’ patients are in fact ‘minimally conscious.’ Between new diagnostics the potential for neuro-prosthetics, and what we are finding out about ‘cheating death’ [http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/10/12/cheating.death.excerpt/index.html] we should not be expanding the definition of death, but realizing that we that are expanding the boundaries of life.
October 15th, 2009 | 3:47 pm
In pursuit of any goal there are, theoretically, infinite paths thereto. Anyone with a conscience can without difficulty discern which of these is evil and which is good (or “least bad”).
e.g.,
Good path: rigorous [and, needless say, ethical] pursuit of organ replacement technologies.
Evil path: accommodating, for the purpose of increasing the quantity of viable transplant organs, a new definition of “dead” which skates dangerously close to “murder”.
That we need something called Center for Bioethics and Culture in the first place is surely at the root of the problem.
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