Quick Takes – Deadly Harvest: Harvesting Organs… From The Healthy… and Denying It To The Mentally Disabled

     Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

     The focus this time: Harvesters of death and sorrow

     First, a little mood music:

     Carrying on…

     Euthanasia by means of ripping organs for the condemned bodies has become so normalized, that it’ll be considered malpractice to not kill.

“Now, organ harvesting after euthanasia has become so normalized within the medical intellegentsia, that an American Medical Association publication, JAMA Surgery, had a letter debate — not about the propriety of killing and harvesting, but about whether the kill should begin at home or in a hospital.

“Two doctors say that ‘organ donation after euthanasia starting at home’ (ODEH) is the way to go:

“‘The patient is only sedated at home, which marks the start of euthanasia in legal terms but is medically only intended to remove consciousness while vital functions are maintained and secured. Coma induction and the start of the agonal phase [killing] subsequently take place in the intensive care unit after farewells at home and transportation [to the hospital].’

“Their debaters says, no, start the homicides in the hospital:

“‘A guideline for ODEH should be developed, including instructions for physicians on how to act if the condition of the patient deteriorates during transport. In the ODEH case presented by Mulder and Sonneveld, noradrena line was given to maintain adequate blood pressure during transport to the hospital. This could be interpreted as violation of an important principle of organ donation after euthanasia, namely that the euthanasia and organ donationshould be at all times handled as 2 separate entities.’”

     Funny how a person being killed by euthanasia has gone from an option to those suffering from a painful and terminal disease to something to happen to healthy people because they are healthy!

“When organ transplant medicine began, the ‘dead donor rule’ was instituted to assure a wary public that people’s vital organs would only be procured after the person was dead. A corollary to that rule assures the public that people will not be killed for their body parts.

“The dead-donor rule has been under attack for some time within the utilitarian bioethics movement. (I am not writing about the brain-death controversy, which is a separate discussion.) Many bioethicists are now pushing to allow doctors to kill via organ harvest, sometimes called ‘organ donation euthanasia’ (ODE).

“At first, this proposed killing license was supposed to be limited to patients on the verge of death or the permanently unconscious. Now, a prominent bioethics journal has published a piece urging that healthy people be allowed to die by removal of vital organs.

“The author claims that because people can instruct life-sustaining treatment to be withdrawn (LST), and can donate their organs after death, that ODE is also OK because it will result in death, too, and result in more usable organs procured and more lives saved.”

     And who benefits from this killing? Certainly not the disabled… for now.

“An important and bipartisan bill has been filed in Congress to end organ-transplant discrimination against people developmental disabilities. Authored by Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler (R., Wash.) and Katie Porter (D., Calif.), the Charlotte Wood Organ Transplant Discrimination Prevention Act (H.R. 1235) would:

   A covered entity may not, solely on the basis of a qualified individual’s mental or physical disability—

    (1)deem such individual ineligible to receive an anatomical gift or organ transplant;

   (2)deny such individual medical or related organ transplantation services, including evaluation, surgery, counseling, and postoperative treatment and care;

   (3)refuse to refer the individual to a transplant center or other related specialist for the purpose of evaluation or receipt of an organ transplant;

   (4)refuse to place an individual on an organ transplant waiting list, or placement of the individual at a lower-priority position on the list than the position at which the individual would have been placed if not for the disability of the individual; or

   (5)decline insurance coverage for such individual for any procedure associated with the receipt of an anatomical gift, including post-transplantation care if such procedure would be covered under such coverage for such individual if not for the disability of the individual.

“This is an important issue of human exceptionalism. Each and every one of us is equal and should be treated equally. Developmental disability in and of itself should never be a bar to receiving proper medical care based on invidious notions of ‘quality of life,’ or other such excuses for abuse or medical neglect.”

     TTFN.

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