Death by organ donation being discussed as new MAID possibility for doctors
· Toronto Sun
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A new study by the New England Journal of Medicine said there is a growing acceptance in harvesting organs from medical euthanasia patients while they are sedated and unconscious, but still alive.
Current law prohibits such acts due to the dead donor rule (DDR), which says that people must be dead before organs can be removed (the “death requirement”) and that doctors must not kill a person by means of procuring organs (the “don’t kill rule.”)
In Ontario, this standard is supported by the Gift of Life Act and Canadian medical guidelines overseen by agencies like the Ontario Trillium Gift of Life Network.
The three authors of the paper, titled “Contextualizing the Dead Donor Rule in an Era of Voluntary Euthanasia,” said the growing acceptance of euthanasia complicates DDR because people knowingly consenting to death and euthanasia laws sanction killing by physicians in restricted, limited or well-defined conditions.
The authors of the paper, Drs. Carter Winberg, Ian Ball and Robert D. Truog, are not arguing that the dead donor rule should be discarded. They are instead looking at all of the options and discussing the situation rationally is one of the options available.
“In the setting of regulated voluntary euthanasia and organ donation after euthanasia, death by organ donation warrants open, transparent dialogue,” the study said.
Move could potentially save ‘many lives’
Instead of waiting for the patient to legally die, death by organ donation would save time and could improve the quality of donor organs because “it might substantially increase the donor pool, potentially saving many lives,” the doctors argued.
The sooner an organ transplant occurs, the better the chance the organ survives the transplant into a new host.
However, the authors acknowledged that voluntary euthanasia “has created new ethical territory” for the DDR as medical assistance in dying (MAID) organ donors “are not dead yet, but their death is imminent” from their voluntary request to have their lives ended.
“Traditionally, the death requirement has been a temporal safeguard, demanding that organ procurement occur only after death,” the study said. “Its moral force lies not in the timing itself, but in minimizing harm and sustaining public trust by ensuring that patients are not treated as mere means to an end. Honest discussion must recognize that death by organ donation violates this temporal requirement.”
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Growing acceptance of MAID
With the growing acceptance of organ donation after euthanasia, the doctors said it’s time to reassess the rule as it applies to MAID patients.
“Since current law does not permit death by organ donation, now is the time to safely assess the ethical principles involved,” the report said. “Sanctioned killing in voluntary euthanasia and organ donation after euthanasia place the DDR in a new context. Although death by organ donation violates the death requirement, contextualization of the DDR does not categorically prohibit the adoption and evolution of this practice.”
In a Health Canada report titled, “Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada,” Health Canada received 22,535 reports of MAID in 2024. A total of 16,499 people received MAID; the remaining cases were requests that did not result in a MAID provision (4,017 died of another cause, 1,327 individuals were deemed ineligible and 692 individuals withdrew their request).
— With files from Postmedia Network.