Doctors are now making the case for death by organ donation

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Journal of Medicine article proposes the direct killing of people via organ donation. In the article “Contextualizing the Dead Donor Rule in an Era of Voluntary Euthanasia,” Dr. Robert Truog and colleagues say that since we’ve already redefined death for our current system of organ harvesting, allowing explicit death via donation is just the next logical step. The authors’ argument deals with the Dead Donor Rule (DDR), an ethical standard that says patients must be dead before organ procurement and that clinicians must not cause death by organ retrieval. This rule is supposed to maintain the public’s trust in our organ donation system. But, according to Truog and colleagues, the dead donor rule has already become stretchy: Though the DDR is considered the “ethical linchpin” of transplantation, it has thus functioned less as a moral absolute than as a moral anchor, whose application...