A New Low: Doctors Are Now Making the Case for Death by Organ Donation

Heidi Klessig, M.D. - Analysis : Jul 13, 2026
LifeSiteNews.com

A New England Journal of Medicine article argues the ethical focus in organ donation should shift away from when death occurs and toward 'respecting' patients' choice to be killed for organs.

[LifeSiteNews.com] A July 8 New England Journal of Medicine article proposes the direct killing of people via organ donation. (Image: Pexels)

In the article "Contextualizing the Dead Donor Rule in an Era of Voluntary Euthanasia," Dr. Robert Truog and colleagues say that since we've already redefined death for our current system of organ harvesting, allowing explicit death via donation is just the next logical step.

The authors' argument deals with the Dead Donor Rule (DDR), an ethical standard that says patients must be dead before organ procurement and that clinicians must not cause death by organ retrieval. This rule is supposed to maintain the public's trust in our organ donation system.

But, according to Truog and colleagues, the dead donor rule has already become stretchy:

Though the DDR is considered the "ethical linchpin" of transplantation, it has thus functioned less as a moral absolute than as a moral anchor, whose application requires ongoing interpretation and adaptation.

The authors cite the example of "brain death," saying that brain death isn't actual biological death, but serves as an example of how we can change the definition of death to suit our needs:

Despite philosophical and biologic uncertainty, brain death was adopted into law and medical practice with the 1981 enactment of the Uniform Determination of Death Act, which defined death as the irreversible cessation of all brain functions. Accumulating clinical experience, however, exposed inconsistencies in this integrative concept of brain death. [Dr. Allan] Shewmon reported many cases of prolonged biologic survival after the determination of brain death. These patients were able to grow, assimilate nutrition and eliminate waste, recover from infections and wounds, even gestate a fetus. Amid uncertainty, organ donation continued, revealing a deeper conceptual pivot. The DDR shifted the determination of death away from strictly biologic criteria toward adherence to diagnostic criteria that were enumerated and endorsed by a definitional authority... Subscribe for free to Breaking Christian News here

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