As They Lay Dying
Two doctors say it’s far too hard for terminal patients to donate their organs.
Thanks to Alex Schadenberg and Wesley Smith for pointing out an article in the Atlantic advocating a “right” for patients to decline “futile” medical treatment and allow doctors to remove their organs while they are alive, under general anesthesia, in an operating room. The organs would be in good shape, having come from a living donor. The patient would be rendered dead.
Can anybody possibly think assisted suicide is “safe”? How free will a very sick patient be who has this idea “suggested” to him with the same lack of finesse shown by the doctor who repeatedly “suggested” to the companion of one of our readers that he sign an unwanted Do Not Resuscitate Order (http://www.truedignityvt.org/this-is-the-horrifying-medical-culture-into-which-the-vermont-legislature-has-injected-assisted-suicide/)?
This also makes us wonder why the state of Utah says it is going to execute people by firing squad if lethal injection drugs are unavailable. Why not execute them by surgery to remove their organs?
The line between executions and assisted suicide is getting thinner and thinner. The proponents of assisted suicide say that the difference is that the people who “choose” assisted suicide are doing so freely. Does anyone really believe that freedom of choice, if it exists now, will survive the pressures of the multiple incentives that exist for doctors to push suicide?
True Dignity has been writing about cost incentives for years. We have written about organ donation incentives before, but the idea of killing through surgery is a new one for us.
Remember, it was doctors-the people whom every assisted suicide law gives the right to decide who does and who does not get a lethal prescription-who wrote this article.
