Quebec: Increase in Organ Donations After Euthanasia

Quelle: FSSPX News

According to a study in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in January, the number of organ donors who died by euthanasia in Quebec has gone from 4.9% (8 donors out of 164) in 2018 to 14% (24 donors out of 171) in 2022. If organ donation in such circumstances has been possible since 2015, a new decisive step has been taken in 2018.

Since this date, Transplant Québec, which coordinates the organ donation process, has encouraged doctors to talk about organ donation to patients who have chosen euthanasia and who are not affected by metastatic cancer.

This is a development which demonstrates the confusion which has taken hold around these two practices, and which reveals a little more the murky origin of the legislation on organ donation, as well as the change in the definition of death.

A Utilitarian Definition

Since its beginnings, legislation on organ donation has been charged with utilitarianism incompatible with the good of the patient and with human dignity. To understand it, we must return to the sources of this legislation. Karl-Leo Schwering presented the point in an article in 2009.

“It is the famous ‘Harvard report’ published in 1968 which launched a definition of death based on the observation of an irreversible coma: brain death. It also sanctioned the kickoff of the implementation of transplants, the expansion of which really seems to coincide with its publication, as much as with the legalization movement which followed it. [...]

“A coincidence which raises a fundamental problem: determining if the approach of redefining death was not motivated in part by interests completely independent of the stated problem. Interests which would amount to wanting to redefine death in order to remove organs, and thus favoring transplantation.”

In France, on April 24, 1968, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health specified the methods of recording the death of a person in a coma after a prolonged resuscitation, which includes the cessation of brain activity, through the Jeanneney memorandum, which legalized at the same time organ harvesting.

With the legalization of euthanasia, the question arose of the possibility of removing organs in this circumstance, a circumstance provided for by the international Maastricht classification system (which also includes assisted suicide) dating back to 1995. Canada adopted a law in accordance with this, through a new shift of the utilitarian spirit.

Far from being alarmed by this shift, Dr. Matthew Weiss, medical director of organ donations at Transplant Québec and author of the study, would like to strengthen the information and improve the conditions for organ donation after euthanasia. According to him, around 10% of people who request euthanasia (“Medical aid in dying” in Québec) would be eligible to make a donation.

The study also highlights the correlated increase in euthanasia and organ donation. We went from 968 patients euthanized between 2017 and 2018 to 3,663 patients between 2021 and 2022. The average age of donors after euthanasia is 6o years old and the majority are men. The most common diagnosis among this population is neurodegenerative problems.

It is difficult not to question the real autonomy of a patient faced with a doctor’s proposal to donate his organs. The possibility of organ donation after euthanasia could constitute an indirect incitement to be euthanized, even pressure in the context of organ shortage. This is what the Canadian study confirms.

The Conditions of Organ Harvesting

One aspect is not explained and probably not known: the conditions under which organs are harvested. The “patient” must be prepared for the removal. Then he is administered a “lethal” product. But even though “brain death” is required to harvest organs, in this case, “circulatory” death suffices--in other words, the cessation of blood circulation.

This circulatory arrest will last five or ten minutes, depending on the case, however with a minimal arterial pressure maintained in order to ensure the perfusion of the organs which must be removed before being transplanted. This means that circulatory arrest is only relative. In fact, doctors are adopting a new concept of death, with the sole aim of harvesting organs.

This overstepping is linked to the increasing demand for transplants. And this is what led to an interest in those who are euthanized to serve as a source of organs.