Protection of Conscience Project News
Service, not Servitude
BioEdge
There is a startling statistic tucked away in Ontario’s September quarter euthanasia statistics. A total of 519 people were euthanised from July 1 to September 30.
Nothing too surprising.
But of the total euthanised, it appears, from government’s sketchy summary, 30 donated organs. In other words, somehow the euthanising doctor and the transplant surgeons coordinated their efforts so that these people could give their organs to others. . . [Full text]
In December 2018 The Tribunal issued an interim judgement:
“The Tribunal’s members are certain – unanimously, and sure beyond reasonable doubt – that in China forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience has been practiced for a substantial period of time involving a very substantial number of victims.”
. . .The Tribunal has considered evidence, in its many forms, and dealt with individual issues according to the evidence relating to each issue and nothing else and thereby reached a series of conclusions that are free of any influence caused by the PRC’s reputation or other potential causes of prejudice. . .
These individual conclusions, when combined, led to the unavoidable final conclusion that;
Forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale and that Falun Gong practitioners have been one – and probably the main – source of organ supply. The concerted persecution and medical testing of the Uyghurs is more recent and it may be that evidence of forced organ harvesting of this group may emerge in due course. The Tribunal has had no evidence that the significant infrastructure associated with China’s transplantation industry has been dismantled and absent a satisfactory explanation as to the source of readily available organs concludes that forced organ harvesting continues till today.
. . . Governments and any who interact in any substantial way with the PRC including:
should now recognise that they are, to the extent revealed above, interacting with a criminal state.
China Tribunal Summary Report – VIEW/DOWNLOAD HERE
The Globe and Mail
In the last moments before Bob Blackwood died, the doctor paused and, in front of a hushed crowd of operating-room staff, thanked Mr. Blackwood for the gift he was about to give.
It was the summer of 2017 and Mr. Blackwood, a 63-year-old former lawyer with a rare and excruciating neurological disorder, was about to become the first patient in Quebec’s eastern townships to donate his organs after receiving a medically assisted death.
“[The doctor] said he hoped that this was something they’ll be able to do more in the future to help save lives,” said Heather Ross, Mr. Blackwood’s widow. “It was just lovely how he put it.” . . . [Full text]
USA Today
How should society respond to the increasingly long list of people waiting for organs on a transplant list? You’ve no doubt heard of “black market” organs in foreign countries, but are there other options that should be off the table?
If you were on a transplant list, would it matter to you if the organ was obtained from a living person who died because of the donation procedure itself? What if she had volunteered?
Your thoughts on this topic have implications beyond the issue of transplantation.
As the former co-director of Vanderbilt University’s lung transplant program and a practicing intensive care unit physician, I see organ donation an selfless gift to those approaching death on transplant wait lists.
However, I’m wrestling with the emerging collision between the worlds of transplantation and euthanasia. . . [Full text]
What does it mean for a human being to “die”? This question is more complex than one might think. In the domain of vital organ procurement, there is significant disagreement about the criteria that we should employ to assess when someone has died.
The standard criterion for several decades has been the “brain death” criterion, according to which a patient can be pronounced dead once “whole brain death” has occurred. Whole brain death refers to the comprehensive and irreversible cessation of brain function, typically caused by trauma, anoxia or tumor.
Yet transplant surgeons have in recent years employed a different, more ethically contentious definition of death, the so-called “circulatory criterion for death”. “Circulatory death” refers to the permanent cessation of cardiopulmonary function, after which point brain tissue quickly begins to deteriorate (if it hasn’t already).
According to proponents of the circulatory criterion, a patient’s heart will never spontaneously restart after 2 or so minutes of pulselessness. As such, it is seen as ethically permissible to begin organ procurement once this short time period has elapsed. There are in practice different time periods specified by healthcare regulators for when organ procurement can begin (typically between 75 seconds and 5 minutes).
Yet several scholars have criticised the cardiopulmonary definition of death, arguing that the impossibility of autoresuscitation does not necessarily indicate that death has occurred. Critics point out that CPR could still restart a person’s heart even when autoresuscitation has become an impossibility.
The most recent criticism came from Kennedy Institute for Ethics bioethicist Robert Veatch, who wrote an extended blog post on the topic this week. Veatch states:
If one opts for requiring physiological irreversibility, death should be pronounced whenever it is physiologically impossible to restore brain function. Autoresuscitation is completely irrelevant. If autoresuscitation can be ruled out before physiological irreversibility, one must still wait until that point is reached. On the other hand, if it becomes physiologically impossible to restore function before autoresuscitation can be ruled out, death can be pronounced at the earlier point. Either way autoresuscitation is irrelevant.
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