By: Mary Marslender

In a recent New England Journal of Medicine article, three medical academics, two of whom are bioethicists, argue that the growing acceptance of voluntary euthanasia “warrants a recontextualization of the dead donor rule and assessment of the ethical principles involved.” Behind the obscurantist language is a horrifying proposal, which co-author Robert Truog described in an interview: Patients “would receive an anesthetic . . . and under anesthesia, the organs would be removed . . . while they’re still functioning.”

Assisted suicide raises enough ethical concerns as it is. The National Council on Disability, on which I served, noted in a 2019 report the longstanding concern that “if assisted suicide is legal, some people’s lives, particularly those of people with disabilities, will be ended without their fully informed and free consent, through mistakes, abuse, insufficient knowledge, and the unjust lack of better options.”

[[…Read more at: The Wall Street Journal…]]