The Snatchers Are Coming for You
By Shafer Parker
Last November I published a blog entitled When a Dead Man Is Not a Dead Man: Truth Stranger than Fiction. I wrote it to awaken readers to the anti-human practices necessary for organ transplantation and to make the point that because legalized organ transplantation requires a non-traditional redefinition of death, it has endangered the sanctity of human life at least as much as legalized abortion. If you click on the link you will find that the factual part of my piece was largely based upon an article by American researcher and anesthesiologist Heidi Klessig, M.D.: We Need an Ethical Definition of Death.
That piece was disturbing enough, but now Klessig is back to report that a new definition is on its way. The problem? In its current form, the new definition is far worse than the old one. If the previous definition gave doctors too much freedom to decide who lives and who dies, the new definition strips all choice from patients and their families, and places their futures entirely in the hands of medical personnel who face strong financial inducements to harvest organs rather than heal people.
Let me explain. The current U.S. law is called the Uniform Determination of Death Act, and states that death requires the “irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brainstem.” The popular term, of course, is “brain dead,” and many ordinary citizens have rested in the confidence that no doctor would proceed to harvest organs from anyone who wasn’t all the way brain dead. But as Klessig reports, in actual practice many doctors only examine the brain stem and pronounce death on people who still have detectable brain waves, and other parts of the brain, including the hypothalamus, that are still functioning. If you want to know why doctors are in such a rush, the answer is simple; tissues die when the heart stops pumping or the lungs stop breathing. To be viable an organ must be taken from a living body.
The rush to harvest organs has left doctors open to lawsuits. So, in order to protect doctors while they continue harvesting living organs, new proposed wording by the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) no longer speaks of “irreversible” cessation of functions. Instead it refers to a condition called “permanent coma” or “permanent cessation of spontaneous respiratory functions, and permanent loss of brainstem reflexes.”
To the untrained ear, the difference between “irreversible” and “permanent” are not obvious. But in the medical world “permanent" has come to mean that physicians do not intend to act to reverse the patient’s condition. As Dr. Klessig says, “People in a coma whose prognosis is death will be declared dead under this new standard.” But “prognosis” doesn’t mean dead, and, in fact, such patients are not dead. Many people in this condition have proven to be only temporarily disabled. In other words, they’ve recovered and lived full lives, in some cases, for many years. For that reason the Catholic Medical Association and the Christian Medical and Dental Association have written letters to the ULC in protest.
There’s more in Klessig’s article, and you should definitely read the whole thing, but for now I think I will turn to the question, why should Canadians care? Well, here’s the answer, as I wrote in my original article last November:
“This has been an American story, so far, but it is relevant to Canadians because, with Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) now the law of our home and native land, we are even farther down the road toward allowing doctors to deliberately cause death, in order, as they say, to provide life to others. On this matter there are only two groups, (1) those who see life as a precious gift from God to be treasured and enhanced until God decides the person’s time is up, and (2) those who see human life from a utilitarian perspective, effectively treating human beings like horses that get too old or too injured to pull their weight. ‘To the glue factory organ harvesters’ is now official policy.”
To finish, I want to replay another portion of last November’s article, a summary of the science fiction story that first influenced my thinking while I was still in high school. In Larry Niven’s 1967 short story “The Jigsaw Man,” he coined the term organlegger. A variation on bootlegger, in Niven’s vision of the future, organlegging describes the transportation and sale of illegal human organs. Niven foresaw a world in which transplant science had reached such a level that almost any part or portion of human anatomy could be transplanted into another body. Then he worked out the ramifications, and they were frightening. For instance, just as the regular replacement of parts can keep a car running, so the regular replacement of body parts could, he imagined, keep an old human body going long past its expected “best before” date. That would mean, Niven surmised, that the wealthy could pay to keep themselves alive longer than anyone else.
But here is where Niven’s prophetic voice has already proved itself horrifyingly accurate. Where there’s money to be made in the illicit trade of body parts, there will be “snatchers,” (his word) willing to bring in new, living victims to be taken apart by black market doctors and stored in organ banks until the right match could be found (meaning someone wealthy enough to afford the new “parts”).
As I’ve mentioned, the part about the necessity of only harvesting organs from living victims matters, and Niven saw it. Lew, the story’s protagonist, is in jail for a minor infraction where he learns from an inmate in the next cell that a “snatch man” would never kill anyone. “He’d find someone out alone at night, drug him and take him home to the doc that ran the ring. It was the doc that did all the killing. If Bernie’d brought home a dead donor, the doc would have skinned him down.”
We leave Larry Niven’s horrifying imaginative world behind, now, and travel 60 years into the future, to the equally horrifying world of 2023, a world in which the definition of death is in constant flux, specifically to avoid having to acknowledge that it is fiction that transplant organs are harvested from dead bodies. They are not.
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