DISTURBING: Canadian Doctors Suggest Harvesting Organs From Euthanasia Patients BEFORE THEY’RE DEAD
Medical freedom advocates are documenting emerging ties between ‘medical assistance in dying’ and organ harvesting.
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By Logan Washburn January 08, 2025
Canadian doctors have suggested killing euthanasia victims by taking their organs, according to multiple reports, whistleblowers, and public talks. Medical freedom advocates are documenting emerging ties between “medical assistance in dying” (MAID) and organ harvesting.
“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, an ethicist of the London Health Sciences Centre in Ontario.
Sibbald spoke on “Threats to the Concept of Brain Death: Ethical Reflections” at the Critical Care Canada Forum in November 2018. The event was sponsored by Canadian Blood Services, a tissue and organ donation group; the Trillium Gift of Life Network, which is “responsible for delivering and coordinating organ and tissue donation and transplantation across the province” of Ontario; and the Canadian Donation and Transplantation Research Program, which hopes to “increase the availability of transplants.”
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.
‘Is the Dead Donor Rule Even Relevant?’
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?”
He suggested death may not occur at one particular moment in time, and 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,” Sibbald 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.”
But Sibbald told The Federalist, “None of my previous comments should be taken as a suggestion that physicians should operate outside the bounds of existing legal or professional ethical standards.”
“Rather, I have suggested that in light of legal developments we should take time to consider whether other legal or professional standards are now also in need of update or reconsideration,” Sibbald said.
Sibbald claimed in a September 2018 article he co-authored for The New England Journal of Medicine that the dead donor rule follows a “perceived requirement to maintain the firewall between what is done for the patient (facilitating a rapid and peaceful death) and what is done for potential organ recipients (retrieving organs that have the least possible injury). … But these principles have less merit in cases of voluntary euthanasia.”
While some MAID recipients “may want to be sure that organ procurement won’t begin before they are declared dead,” others may want “the option of donating as many organs as possible and in the best condition possible,” according to the article.
“Following the dead donor rule could interfere with the ability of these patients to achieve their goal,” the article reads. “In such cases, it may be ethically preferable to procure the patient’s organs in the same way that organs are procured from brain-dead patients (with the use of general anesthesia to ensure the patient’s comfort).”
But harvesting organs from patients who are still living would require an “amendment to the Criminal Code of Canada, which defines medical assistance in dying as the administration of a ‘substance’ by a qualified provider. By this definition,” the article noted, “organ retrieval is not an accepted cause of death.”
Still, patients who emphasize “optimizing the number of organs they can donate are best cared for in an operative setting, where they can be fully anesthetized and where optimal organ procurement is supported,” the article said — noting “patients who prefer to donate their organs after death” have “more flexibility” about where the euthanasia takes place.
Killing Patients for Their Organs
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 could be 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.”
Doctors attempted to withdraw life support from one patient multiple times without his consent, according to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms. One afternoon when the patient’s mother was in the hospital, the doctors denied him oxygen above 60 percent, according to JCCF. The same day, he died. The patient had been involved in advocating for religious and medical freedom. In a similar case, a former Canadian politician said he had to “flee with his family to the United States” because doctors told him they would remove his son who drowned from life support, after which “his organs could then be ‘harvested,’” according to LifeSiteNews.
Hancock said she expects the situation to worsen as restraints on MAID loosen over time. According to The Christian Post, Ontario’s Trillium Gift of Life Network — one of the groups sponsoring Sibbald’s speech about premortem harvesting — tells doctors to ask MAID patients about obtaining their organs.
In Ontario, euthanasia deaths boosted organ donations in 2020. In Quebec, 14 percent of organ donors were MAID victims in 2022. One article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal includes a diagram of the MAID to organ harvesting pipeline. This was from 2019, when euthanasia was only allowed for those with foreseeable deaths. Now, doctors can end the lives of patients with unforeseeable deaths.
A chart showing the pipeline from MAID to organ harvesting. James Downar et al. | Canadian Medical Association Journal
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 told The Federalist. “That’s the question — what the h-ll 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.”
Logan Washburn is a former staff writer covering election integrity. He is a spring 2025 fellow of The College Fix. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.
Every donor is killed in the process, he stated. Revoking your organ donation status from your drivers license is not enough, you must also complete a document of refusal.
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Newsflash: There is no such thing as brain dead, You cannot harvest organs from a cadaver, They are no good to anyone. All organs that are harvested are taken from living breathing people.
Those people die when their organs are taken. Do not ever consent to organ donation, They will wheel you down the hall and gut you like a deer.
Far too many people have come out of coma’s, Have come back to life after being declared “brain dead”.
Isn’t that what they have always done anyway? Now they’re admitting it?