GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: Pressure building to abolish the dead donor rule

domingo, 5 de mayo de 2019

BioEdge: Pressure building to abolish the dead donor rule

BioEdge: Pressure building to abolish the dead donor rule

Bioedge

Pressure building to abolish the dead donor rule

by Michael Cook | 5 May 2019 |

^{Food shortages in the 1973 film Soylent Green}

An American critical care expert says that more and more doctors are considering the abolition of the “dead donor rule” now that euthanasia is legal in Canada. Writing in USA Today, Professor Wes Ely, of Vanderbilt University, says that conversations at international conferences often turned to “death by donation” – “ending a people’s lives with their informed consent by taking them to the operating room and, under general anesthesia, opening their chest and abdomen surgically while they are still alive to remove vital organs for transplantation into other people.”

At the moment, this procedure is legally a homicide in both the US and Canada. Its proponents defend it by arguing that it would only happen with informed consent and that it might even be ethically preferable. Dr Ely’s take on the controversy is different:

When physicians are participating in a procedure designed to take a person’s life, will patients feel 100% certain that their physician is firmly on the side of healing? What message does it send about the value of every human life when physicians endorse the exchange of one life for another? What affect has it already had on physicians complicit in such death-causing procedures?
In the 1973 science fiction classic "Soylent Green," detective Frank Thorn searches for answers to dying oceans and a deteriorating human race on overcrowded Earth. He discovers the high-protein green food produced by the Soylent Corporation is recycled, euthanized humans. “Soylent Green is people!” he screams.
"Soylent Green" was set in 2022. We are three years away.

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge

The government's statistics for euthanasia in the Netherlands were released recently. They show that the number of people who took advantage of legal assisted suicide and euthanasia declined slightly -- about 7% -- for the first time since 2006.

To be completely candid, I regard a decline in the number of euthanasia cases as good news. That is, if it is true. It is possible that more cases were simply not reported to the authorities. Fewer euthanasia cases means fewer people in desperate pain and fewer people who feel that their lives are meaningless.

However, this is not the way that euthanasia supporters see it. For them it was bad news because fewer people had taken advantage of the blessing of a peaceful death. From their point of view, good news is an ever-increasing, upward-sloping line on a graph.

Euthanasia already accounts for at least 4% of all deaths in the Netherlands. What proportion are its supporters aiming at? 5%? 10%? 40%? I have never read any projections of this figure. It would be interesting to know what the future holds for the Dutch.