Greg Dahlmann, at blog.bioethics.net, alerts readers to Graeme Wood’s article arguing that we should permit (in Dahlmann’s words) “death row prisoners to, essentially, die by organ donation.”
Wood’s article is titled “Let’s Harvest the Organs of Death-Row Inmates“:
But by using what the bioethicist Arthur Caplan calls “the Mayan Protocol”—a term derived from the ancient Mayan practice of vivisecting their human sacrifices—the removal of organs would itself be the method of execution. If this sounds inhumane, compare it to current practices: botched hangings, painfully long gassings, and messy electrocutions. Removal of the heart, lungs, and kidneys (under anesthesia, of course) would kill every time, without an instant of pain.
So far, the organs of all criminals executed in the United States have stayed with their original owners. Consider the loss. Someone died waiting for that killer’s heart. Two died waiting for his kidneys, and two more suffocated for lack of his lungs. The liver, split two ways, could have saved two babies. Take the hair, bone, skin, ligaments, and fluids for grafts and transfusions, and all that’s left of the donor’s body could be shuffled off into a very petite coffin indeed. The inmate could allow nearly a dozen people to live, in exchange for a body he wouldn’t be around to enjoy anyway. The math says we should encourage death-row organ donation.
Apparently, neither Dahlmann nor Wood are aware that Wood is parroting the arguments and advocacy of Jack Kevorkian. Kevorkian carried on a “crusade” to allow just this sort of access to condemned prisoners for almost three decades. Admittedly, his crusade wasn’t limited to organ harvesting, but embraced live human experimentation as well.
All anyone needs to do to confirm this is to check the Amazon listing for Kevorkian’s “Prescription: Medicide,” published in 1991:
(From the 1991 Publishers Weekly review on the Amazon page linked above)
Kevorkian gained notoriety last year when he performed the first publicly acknowledged “physician-assisted suicide” by helping Janet Adkins, a victim of
Alzheimer’s disease, take her own life. The method of death was the Mercitron, the “suicide machine” Kevorkian invented, which enables a person to self-administer a lethal injection. In this self-dramatizing, often strident manifesto he argues that “medicide,” his term for doctor-assisted suicide, is an ethical option that should be extended not only to the infirm or terminally ill, but also to inmates on death row. Condemned prisoners, he maintains, should, if they choose, be executed via general anesthesia, with the option of donating organs or having their intact bodies used for medical experimentation. (emphasis added)
Wood, writing on this subject, should know enough to give credit where credit is due. His arguments and advocacy are near-perfect echoes of Kevorkian’s own ultimately discredited cause. And ethicists like Dahlmann should already be familiar with Kevorkian’s work. –Stephen Drake
One of the best books written about Kevorklan, was “Appointment with Doctor Death,” written by Michael Betzold in 1993. Kevorkian had visions of opening “obitoriums” where people with disabilities could go to be euthanized and have their organs harvested. He also had grandiose plans to do unique experiments. (From page 32 of the book) “The removal of organs from a mentally competent 30-year-old man, in great pain, and essentially helpless due to worsening cerebral palsy” who “is granted his wish to die in an obitorium.” We have entered the slippery slope. Kevorkian is a monster who certainly has no place on the political scene. He is no friend to people with disabilities.
This notion of criminals having organs harvested is an old one, at least conceptually. I recall reading, many years ago, science fiction stories about “organleggers” (the term based on “bootleggers”, of course) who took organs from poor people for the benefit of the rich.
valerie,
I agree that Betzold’s book is well-researched and an excellent resource. Trouble is that many people won’t believe what *others* write about Kevorkian, no matter how thorough the research.
I make it a practice to *invite* people to read Kevorkian’s book and some of his journal articles. It’s kind of hard to refute what he himself has written about human experimentation, infanticide and other “brave new world” stuff. –Stephen
anonymous,
Nice to see another science fiction fan posting here. A quick check of memory (and help from google) identify Larry Niven as an author who played around with those ideas, although he wrote his stories several years after Kevorkian’s advocacy on this began (might even have been Niven’s inspiration).
Theodore Sturgeon has also played with these ideas in some of his novels. –Stephen