Killing People for Their Organs
A recent National Post article highlights a New England Journal of Medicine paper on “death by organ donation”. The paper acknowledged that neither the law nor public sentiment currently support harvesting organs from living donors. However the spread of medical assisted suicide policies (like Canada’s MAID) means this is a conversation we’re bound to be having soon enough.
As they stand, the rules prohibit organ removal before the determination of death followed by a five minute “no touch” period. But removal from euthanasia cases could theoretically begin as soon as the patient slipped into unconsciousness.
Would that be a legal and moral bridge too far? Well, perhaps it’s a legal and moral bridge that, for the most part, we already crossed decades ago.
It all comes down to two questions:
How do you define death?
Who gets to apply that definition?
Medical standards once required the irreversible loss of all brain function (“brain death”) before harvesting was permitted. That standard has, over the past few decades, shifted to allow intervention as soon as “controlled circulatory death” occurs - even before brain death. This means organs can be removed while there’s still measurable brain stem activity.
According to Ontario Health’s Trillium Gift of Life Network, the final go ahead is signaled when “two physicians who are not connected to Trillium Gift of Life Network will confirm that a patient has died.”
But can donors and their families know which standards those two physicians will use? Will those standards necessarily fit with the requirements of various religious traditions and with the wishes of potential donors?
As far as I can tell, there’s absolutely no way to find out.
Because I have no pressing plans for my organs once I’m no longer using them, I was once interested in signing up for the program. Why not make them available for other people? So five years ago I contacted Trillium for clarification. They didn’t seem to even understand my question.
To my knowledge, no one has yet objectively defined the precise biological transition between life and death. At a certain point, we can all agree that it’s over. But I don’t particularly want some distracted, sleep-deprived residents with conflicting incentives to decide when that point has arrived.
What kind of conflicting incentives could there be? We can all appreciate a doctor’s impatience to use my organs to save another life. But then there’s CanMEDS 2025 (now often described simply as CanMEDS). That’s the Royal College of Physicians’ new framework for identifying and describing “the abilities physicians require to effectively meet the health care needs of the people they serve.”
According to the College website, the proposed changes (now only available as a web archive) will require physicians to:
Support the goals of anti-racism and anti-oppression
Support the goal of equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility
Those are incentives about which I’m less comfortable. Doctors trained with those standards might honestly try to establish that there’s been genuinely irreversible1 damage before signing off on my death. But they might also opt for “their truth” and apply “equity” priorities instead. And there’s no way for me to know in time to do anything about it.
Considering how loosely end-of-life is currently defined, what do you want to bet that, soon enough, it’ll be extended ever so slightly to include breathing MAID patients.
The Assault on Professional Competence
According to Statistics Canada, there are nearly 250,000 professional engineers in Canada, along with 350,000 nurses (and allied health professionals), 120,000 physicians (and veterinarians), 105,000 lawyers, and 92,000 therapists.
Assessing the Public Funding Crisis Impacting Canadian Universities
It’s been a while since I last wrote about higher education in Canada but the industry’s steady clamor for more public funding hasn’t gone anywhere. Universities Canada and the Canadian Association of University Business Officers just released a new report
Although I’m not aware of any objective standard for measuring “irreversible”.
China is way ahead in this arena and we are far too cosy with China.
While I was nursing I knew that good palliative care-hospice care-was underfunded and underused. Good pain control is possible and too often not provided. In the early days, the proponents of MAiD were all about championing ‘control’ over an unacceptably agonizing undignified end.
Let’s be clear here: I’m not talking about keeping people alive using advanced technology, well past time they would die without the IV’s, feeding tubes and ventilators-that’s another facet of first-world wealth too but it’s not this discussion.
Sorry, but how entitled is the phenomenon of first-worlders with paid health care who want control over every aspect of fate? So, they ask a medical person to kill them by injection rather than suffer the slower process of diseases like ALS or dementia.
But now, Pandora’s box open, it’s offered to disabled veterans who ask for money to put in a ramp. Being on ‘pause’ for people with only mental illness. If that was in play a few years back I could have lost 2 of my kids, while they were psychotically depressed.
Ask any third-world famine sufferer who has watched their children die of starvation; ask any nurse with time in:
Death is not dignified. Age and infirmity are not dignified.
Palliative care done properly, without actually murdering someone is possible and effective.
I wanted nothing to do with MAiD while I nursed, and want nothing to do with it still. It’s a path rife for abuse-and forced organ donation lies down it.
Being essentially libertarian and therefore among the smallest of minorities in Canada, I've always been opposed to the guild socialism of professions and guilds being granted monopoly right to practice legislation. Now that the long march has ensured that they all have been captured with culture Marxism, the authoritarian impulse is presenting as shaming sessions and career cancellation for dissenters. In BC , where I thankfully retired, even resigning as a retired non-practicing professional as the capture was metastasizing, the provincial NDP have now legislated their own appointees on the boards of the professions to ensure political conformance to such apartheid reinforcement and inversion examples of social engineering and thought control as DRIPA. I'm reminded of the former Soviet (or SS) political officers inserted into the ranks of their officer corps. This, to ensure that such tropes as "indigenous knowledge" (racism masquerading as mysticism) is incorporated into "professional" standards. "Cradle to Grave" statism is now an increasingly pervasive aspect of the remnants of a once free western civilization.