The medical slippery slope
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column in the Daily Mail arguing against an automatic presumption that dead people should have their organs removed for transplant purposes, with an op-out for objectors. In the article, I said that organ donors were not actually dead when their organs were removed. Various people then expressed reactions ranging from bafflement to rage, on the basis that it was axiomatically the case that donors were dead before their organs were removed -- and anyway, how dare I argue against saving the lives of those who were given the transplanted organs.
Has Gordon Brown ever stood at his dying teenage son’s bedside and been asked to sign the form giving consent to using his son’s body for spare part surgery? I have. And I refused. That refusal caused considerable commotion and puzzlement, but four hours later it was decided to give my son Simon, aged 18, a chance. Even then, my husband and I were told we would only ever have ‘a vegetable.’As I wrote in my Mail article, I believe there is much that we don’t know about the brain. As a result, diagnoses that parts or all of the brain have been destroyed -- and that therefore there is no life in the body -- have on occasion turned out to be wrong. I also think that the definition of ‘brain death’ that enables organs to be removed from a body while the heart is still beating unassisted (the ventilator does not cause the heart to beat artificially, merely feeds it with oxygenated blood through the artificially sustained activity of the lungs — a crucial but often overlooked distinction which means that while some of the body’s tissues are functioning normally the patient cannot be dead) was devised to allow organs to be removed from a body that is sustaining them with the life that is essential if they are to be successfully transplanted.Simon’s injuries from his involvement in a car crash (in which he was an innocent back seat passenger) were mainly brain damage. He remained unconscious for four-and-a-half months and it was thanks to a brilliant consultant and brain surgeon that eventually he began to recover. At home, after six months in hospital, we all made him our priority. He had to learn to walk and talk again, and all this he did with an amazing sense of humour. My youngest son spent hours and hours pushing him round the garden in a wheelchair and later kicking a football for him to return, to encourage him to use his legs.
Simon did walk and did talk again. In fact, he had a job as a reporter on a Fleet Street national newspaper for more than 25-years. We had him for another 34 years in total, during which we holidayed to America four times and travelled all over Britain. He enjoyed a tremendous quality of life – and enriched the lives of anyone with whom he came into contact. Our doctor said Simon’s sudden death in 2002, aged 51, was as a result of lingering brain damage he suffered all those years ago. To lose a son is a tragedy but the memories of our happy times together give me so much to treasure. Your piece is to be applauded and please let me know how I can support any campaign against compulsory organ transplants.
That means donors are dying but not dead; and that means the removal of the organs kills them. And call me old-fashioned, but I happen to believe that killing sick patients is wrong.
Unfortunately, the moral confusion of our age means that absolute moral values have widely given way to utilitarian and consequentialist thinking, which means in essence that bad means are justified by good ends. That is ultimately the way to tyranny and mass murder. Lamentably, the leadership of our medical profession — whose ethics are supposed to make it the front line of defence of personal autonomy and the right to life —has substituted utilitarianism and consequentialism for the foundation ethical precept of medicine: ‘First do no harm’. This is why, as a story in the Sunday Telegraph reports, doctors are calling for NHS treatment to be withheld from patients who are too old or who lead unhealthy lives. It’s all part of the moral brutalisation of a medical profession which now sees nothing wrong in killing unconscious patients by starving or dehydrating them to death, or using bits of discarded human embryos to create clones and even animal/human chimeras — all in the interests of furthering the happiness of the greatest number. Once human life becomes instrumentalised like this and used as a means to an end, the veneer of civilised values starts to peel away.