The specter of the assisted-suicide-to-orga- donation pipeline has again raised its unethical head. A story out of Belgium has people lining up to take sides and ask questions after a 16-year-old girl approved for euthanasia had her organs tested and then harvested.
In an October commentary piece for Epoch Times, patient rights champion, author, and podcast host Wesley J. Smith wrote about several countries where “shortage of organs for transplantation is threatening to unleash immoral and unethical remedies,” as assisted suicide threatens to become a too-profitable source for organs. He mentioned the example of a 16-year-old Belgian girl who requested assisted suicide due to a brain tumor — and agreed to have her organs harvested. The teen spent 36 hours sedated and intubated in an ICU for the “examination” of her organs. After that she was euthanized, and her organs were harvested.
We’ve slipped down this slope before on these pages. Canada, also mentioned in the linked piece, has widened the net of situations where you can ask to die while making “living” that much more difficult. It’s as if they want people to ask to kill themselves.
Canada’s socialized healthcare system is notorious for its protracted wait times for even the most basic tests. I can’t imagine the lockdowns, which kept millions from planned visits, treatments, or surveillance exams, have helped matters. And then there is the rise in mental health suicides. In other words, the government has, well and good, mucked it up. You can’t get the treatment you want or need. This results in an increased number of people feeling trapped in mental or physical illness. (…)
And then, they ask them if they will donate their organs. In the case of the Belgian teen, Smith is reported as observing that,
First, this was a minor terrified of decline who stated that by donating organs, she believed she could do some good. But for that option, she might not have made that decision.
Second, as far as we know, the girl wasn’t provided suicide prevention services nor assured that palliative care could alleviate her symptoms.
Third, the lengthy sedation and intubation to which she was subjected weren’t for her benefit, but to allow her organs to be tested and find compatible recipients. In other words, at least in some sense, once the girl asked to donate her organs, her body parts became more important than her life.
It has been suggested – just a few hours north of me – that the economically disadvantaged should get access to MAiD. It is an idea that is trending among ethicists ot such a degree that we should expect Inigo Montoya to leap into the room and tell us that the word ethicist does not mean what they think it means.
Infamous bioethicist Peter Singer thinks people should be killed for their organs, which must have the organ harvesters at Planned Parenthood grinning from ear to ear. If it is dying anyway, let’s make something good come from it, and ironically, the two are not far apart morally. If the government can sanction aborting humans at any age for their organs, aborting babies late-term to harvest theirs can’t be an ethical dilemma.
Who among us cannot picture women getting paid to carry babies to be aborted in the third trimester for their organs?
Note to those who thought we were a bit over the top when we call pro-abortion progressives the party of death.
Smith explained that Singer and those who agree with him aim “unscientifically [to] redefine death from a biological state of nonbeing into a sociological status of lesser value, equivalent to ‘as good as dead.’” And where have we heard that before? From the Nazis who committed the Holocaust, having set themselves up as arbiters of which lives were valuable.
It is the slipperiest of slopes, especially when the State has the power to define your mental health and massage the circumstances until more of us fit into the assisted suicide box they’ve created so some campaign donor can profit from a new natural resource for the organ harvesting market.
Talk about a threat to vulnerable populations.
And I want to think this is a crazy conspiracy theory, but it is already happening, just not here.
Or should I say, not yet?
