Canadian doctors are euthanizing citizens deemed “no longer useful” to harvest their organs for those deemed “more deserving,” according to multiple disabled whistleblowers from Canada’s public health system who have resisted state pressure to be euthanized.
Whistleblowers, public talks, and reports are shedding light on this unsettling proposal, as medical freedom advocates warn of growing ties between the Canadian Medical Assistance in Dying program (MAID) and the controversial practice of organ harvesting.
The global organ market is a lucrative black market trade, with trafficked organs making up up to 10% of all transplants worldwide. A solitary kidney can fetch between $50,000 and $120,000.
Canada is the top country for organ donations via euthanasia. Still, its national health system had an organ shortage in December 2022, with more than 3,700 patients awaiting a transplant.
Health officials are trying to close gaps like these by killing patients to harvest their organs, anti-euthanasia advocates told The Federalist.
Disabled whistleblower Roger Foley, who says he has been pressured to accept euthanasia four times, told The Federalist Sibbald’s speech appears to suggest doctors might harvest organs from live patients.
“His statement is like, ‘We’ll just do it anyway, we’ll let the physicians do it. And after they start doing it, if there’s ever a complaint, then it will go to the courts, and then the courts can decide if this is right or wrong,’” Foley said. “It could be they’re already doing euthanasia by organ harvesting, we just don’t know about it.”
He called MAID a “sliding practice” due to “ableism and disdain for persons with disabilities and the vulnerable.”
“This sliding leads not only towards expansion of eligibility criteria, but also towards euthanasia organ harvesting methods,” Foley said. “The human race is not mature enough to have euthanasia and assisted suicide legalized anywhere. The focus should be on improving supports for vulnerable persons to live and improving palliative care at end of life.”
Heather Hancock, another disabled patient who says doctors pressured her to accept MAID, told The Federalist euthanasia victims are another means for doctors to obtain organs.
“Suddenly organ transplants have gone up since MAID’s been involved. New patients are eligible to be donors,” Hancock said.
She also said killing patients helps fund Canada’s public health care system.
“MAID is a huge money-making business — now they’re saving money on future healthcare,” Hancock said. “They’re literally denying us healthcare treatment and offering us MAID instead.”
Angelina Ireland is executive director of the Delta Hospice Society, an end-of-life care facility that the Canadian government shut down and then took over for not terminating its patients. The group now advocates against euthanasia. Ireland said the dead donor rule is “all in question.”
“They are now talking about ‘pre-mortem’ interventions to harvest organs of MAID recipients,” Ireland said. “That’s the question — what the hell is going on?”
Ireland said there is “plenty of room for abuse.” She cited the book “The Red Market,” which traced human trafficking and organ harvesting around the world.
“You can get big, big money on the world market,” she said. “We have opened ourselves up to some horrific stuff.”
Organ trafficking rises from a “desperate need for organ transplantation surgeries” and takes the form of a “lucrative, transnational criminal enterprise,” according to Canada’s Library of Parliament. Trafficked organs constitute up to 10 percent of organ transplants worldwide, the study says. A kidney can range from $50,000 to $120,000.
“Purchasers are normally wealthy persons from developed nations such as Canada,” according to the library. The network often includes a broker between buyer and seller, a “local recruiter,” and “medical professionals and local hospitals performing the illicit organ removal.”
“It is the ‘Canadian cull’ — a systematic elimination of the weak, sick, old, and vulnerable via the state euthanasia program called MAID,” Ireland said. “The Government has taken the most sacred right from its citizens, the power to kill them.”
She said while some Americans complain about private healthcare, socialized medicine also has serious problems.
“In a public health-care system, there are a whole new set of mafioso who are deciding to take a person’s body and soul,” Ireland said. “There is no recourse and no justice.”
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| Euthanasia pod made by the company Sarco |
Yet, academics and medical professionals in Canada are attempting to justify the practice of culling the elderly and infirm in favor of those deemed useful by the state.
“The best use of my organs, if I’m going to receive a medically assisted death, might be to not first kill me and then retrieve my organs, but to have my mode of death — as we medically consider death now — to be to retrieve my organs,” said Rob Sibbald, said Rob Sibbald, an ethicist of the London Health Sciences Centre in Ontario. The Federalist reports:
Other Canadian doctors have publicly embraced “death by donation,” and a study came out earlier this year exploring euthanasia programs such as MAID as a means of organ harvesting. Canada legalized euthanasia in 2016, and since then the number of Canadians using MAID to kill themselves has significantly increased.
Sibbald’s biography says he co-directs the “Canadian unit of the International Network of the UNESCO chair in bioethics.” During his speech, he suggested blurring the lines on the “dead donor rule,” a long-standing medical ethics guideline requiring that donors die of another natural cause before doctors harvest their organs.
“We’re so invested in this dead donor rule,” Sibbald said. “That rule has become so ingrained in the medical community that we hold it out as a foundational principle. … And I think just as likely there are people who question that value now. And I know there’s perhaps not an appetite to go there, but raising the question — is the dead donor rule even relevant?”
Sibbald said the “best use” of organs from patients who are “going to receive a medically assisted death” could be to harvest them while the victim is alive.
“If, to meet your definition of the dead donor rule, you have to consider me dead once you’ve first put me under and you have no intention of bringing me back — well then fine, I can accept that if those are my values,” he said.
The ethicist appeared to imply that doctors should make this decision on their own, asking forgiveness rather than permission.
“I think legally, yes, we do need an answer, and we’re going to come to that,” Sibbald said. “But of the possible solutions to our pragmatic issues, we can continue to allow physicians to decide and let the conflict go to the courts.”
