Canadian Doctors Propose ‘Death By Organ Donation’ For Euthanasia Seekers

(LifeSiteNews) — Three doctors published a paper in a top medical journal pushing for “death by organ donation,” where people undergoing euthanasia would be killed by having their organs removed.

The paper is titled “Contextualizing the Dead Donor Rule in an Era of Voluntary Euthanasia” and was published in The New England Journal of Medicine in early July. 

The co-authors are Dr. Ian Ball, Dr. Carter Winberg, and Dr. Robert Truog. They stated in the paper that “In death by organ donation, the patient’s authorization, experience, and outcome are not altered by whether death occurs moments before or during organ retrieval.”

“Voluntary euthanasia creates a new ethical context, complicating the DDR and established approaches to organ donation: patients are not yet dead, but their death is imminent and results directly from voluntary medical intervention,” the doctors wrote. 

“The current legal reality of voluntary euthanasia provides a new context for interpreting the Don’t Kill Rule,” as euthanasia “circumvents” the rule against killing by physicians, they said.

“In this landscape, the moral significance of strict temporal sequencing (post, not pre-mortem retrieval) is diminished,” they wrote.

“Ethical focus should therefore shift away from identifying a precise moment of biologic death and toward respecting patients’ autonomous decisions, ensuring that safeguards against coercion and exploitation are robust and advocating for a transparent and publicly accountable process,” the authors added.

Currently, so-called death by organ donation is illegal in Canada. The practice involves killing a person by harvesting their organs. As it stands now, organs can only be donated from a person who is supposed to have been declared “clinically dead.”

The doctors claim that allowing this in practice would somehow be a good thing for humanity. 

News of the paper calling for death by organ donation was quickly blasted by pro-life Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis, who said safeguards must be in place for vulnerable Canadians.

“Reports of proposals to retrieve organs from MAiD patients before death raise profound ethical questions that Canadians should not dismiss,” she wrote in a recent X post. “These discussions underscore the importance of maintaining clear safeguards and ensuring that organ donation never compromises the value we place on human life.”

Lewis said that Canadians “deserve thoughtful, transparent debate on these issues.”

“We must protect the vulnerable, uphold informed consent, and ensure that compassion and human dignity remain at the heart of our healthcare system,” she added.

Even mainstream figures in Canada’s medical system are concerned about so-called death by organ donation. 

Bioethicist and assistant professor at the University of Toronto Kerry Bowman was cited as telling local media that the practice is “very problematic.”

He noted that the public reaction to “death by organ donation” will be “very negative,” adding he has spoken to some religious leaders about the topic. 

“There’s a lot of deep religious concern that if the cause of death is actually organ donation, from a religious point of view, it would be considered very problematic,” he noted.

Bowman added that even the non-religious find the whole concept “very worrisome.”

“We have enough challenges in this country right now with (MAID),” he said, adding “I would argue this is an unnecessary distraction at a difficult time.”

Euthanasia in Canada has been legal since 2016.

In 2027, the expansion of euthanasia for the mentally ill is slated to become law as a consequence of Bill C-7 passing. This will happen unless it is stopped by the current Liberal government under Prime Minister Mark Carney, who is unlikely to stop it given his track record on life issues. 

Canada’s Catholic bishops, recently reflecting on the “sobering” 10th anniversary of euthanasia legalization, called for a renewed respect for life and a rejection of the “complacency with the status quo on euthanasia in Canada” today, noting the deadly practice can “never” be morally acceptable.

“MAID” (“Medical Assistance in Dying”), as it’s known, has become so commonplacethat hospitals have been known to promote the procedure to patients in need of long-term care.

As recently reported by LifeSiteNews, a man and his wife from Canada had enough of the nation’s death regime, recounting how he had to flee the nation to the United States to get treatment for his wife’s cancer after Canadian health officials claimed that euthanasia was her only option and pushed death by assisted suicide as the only possibility for her. 

Indeed, as reported by LifeSiteNews, a close contact and primary care advocate of disabled Canadian Roger Foley, who is suffering from a degenerative brain disease and living in “constant pain,” says the hospital he has been staying at for some time is trying to “kill him” by not giving him the care that he needs to survive.

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