By: Shafer Parker

I probably shouldn’t admit this in public, but here I go anyway. I’m a huge fan of science fiction, and that means I’ve read tons of secular authors who are decidedly not Christians. Nevertheless, I justify my hobby on the grounds that C. S. Lewis was also a fan (not to mention one of the finest authors in the field). In fact, science fiction historian Brian Aldis has written, “With the possible exception of Huxley, C. S. Lewis was the most formidable and respected champion of science fiction the modern genre has known.”

But I didn’t begin this blog to write about Lewis. I intend to write about death, and the medical definition of death, and how the corruption of the definition has put our world at grave risk. “Then why,” you ask, “bring up Lewis and science fiction at all?” Here’s why. Now that I’ve roped in Lewis to defend my love for a mostly non-Christian genre of literature, I can share that since high school Larry Niven has been one of my favourite science fiction authors. And for today’s blog Niven matters.

In his 1967 short story “The Jigsaw Man,” Niven 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. First, 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 second, and here’s where Niven’s prophetic voice has already proved itself horrifyingly true, 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”).

The part about the necessity of 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.” And why does the victim have to be alive? Because once the heart stops beating, once oxygenated blood stops pumping through the body, tissue deteriorates too rapidly to be of any further use.

Join me now, as we leave Larry Niven’s horrifying imaginative world behind and travel back to the equally horrifying world of 2022, a world in which the definition of death is in constant flux, specifically to avoid having to acknowledge it is fiction that transplant organs are harvested from dead bodies. They are not.

GIVE TODAY!

In a recent article entitled “We Need an Ethical Definition of Death,” author Heidi Klessig, M.D., explains the ongoing effect organ transplanting has had on the definition, and redefinition of death. First, she mentions the definition that had prevailed from time immemorial. Because most of the world viewed the human being as a body/soul union, death was defined as when the spirit departed, causing “the loss of integration of the organism as a whole.” In other words, when everything quit—no more heartbeat, breath, blood pressure, or metabolism.

Then, in 1968, coincidentally the year after Niven first published his short story, Klessig reports that “an ad hoc committee of the Harvard Medical School redefined death to include individuals in an ‘irreversible coma.” The change was made specifically to make organ donation possible. It was a waste of resources to keep the hopelessly unconscious patient on a ventilator, the committee chairman said. Besides, society cannot “continue to condone the discard of [their] tissues and organs … when they could be used to restore the hopelessly ill but otherwise salvageable individual.”

Since that decision by the Harvard committee, the definition of death has become little more than a legal smokescreen, designed, on the one hand, to maintain the façade of a medical system that holds human life sacred, while, on the other hand, allowing doctors to harvest organs while, in many cases, brains still function and no consent, from either the patient or the legal guardians, has been obtained.

This has been an American story, so far, but it is relevant to Canadians because, with Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) being 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 with them, or, if anything valuable is left, to the organ harvesters.

What we’ve got now is the worst of two worlds. First, hear the words of Democratic Colorado Governor Richard D. Lamm from a speech given in 1984: Elderly people who are terminally ill “have a duty to die and get out of the way,” he said. Instead of trying to have their lives “artificially” extended, they should see themselves as “leaves falling off a tree and forming humus for the other plants to grow up. … You’ve got a duty to die and get out of the way. Let the other society, our kids, build a reasonable life.” The message first enunciated by Governor Lamb still prevails, and thus the taking of human life in the name of medical care is justified.

Meanwhile, in an unholy alliance with western medical practitioners,Chinese government-approved organleggers are making billions servicing the world’s wealthy, who willingly pay whatever a human life costs these days, just to eek out a few more years running on other peoples’ parts.

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