Canada: Doctors Propose Harvesting Organs from Euthanasia Victims

A paper published by the New England Journal of Medicine suggested that Canada should take advantage of the bumper crop of corpses produced by its euthanasia policies and begin harvesting them for organs.

The organs would be taken from the euthanasia volunteers while they are sedated, but still alive.

Canada’s National Post reported on Thursday that the paper has caused a stir in the Canadian bioethics community because the organ-harvesting proposal might turn a horrified public away from Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID), the Canadian euthanasia program. But the proposal also follows the logic of euthanasia to its ultimate conclusion, which is if people want to die, and they have healthy organs, why not pass those organs along to people who do not want to die?

The paper suggested sedating the patients and removing their organs before death is initiated, to ensure maximum freshness and quality of the organs. This notion runs afoul of Canada’s “dead donor rule” (DDR), a legal requirement that stipulates organ donors must be legally dead before their organs can be taken, so the organ removal process itself cannot be the cause of death.

The paper argued it was time to rethink the DDR in the context of MAID because those who agree to euthanasia are “knowingly consenting to death.” This supposedly minimizes the risk of opportunistic doctors killing people just to get their organs.

“The categorical constraint on physician killing, for its part, is legally and ethically circumvented by voluntary euthanasia,” the paper contended, saying it was “ethically arbitrary” to require “strict temporal sequencing” of death and organ removal for someone who wants to die, and wishes their organs to be donated.

The National Post noted that under current Canadian law, patients must request MAID before organ donation can be discussed, so they do not feel “pressured.” According to recent studies, the number of people who request both medically assisted suicide and wish to donate their organs is growing and Canadian organ donations already outpace other countries with legalized euthanasia.

As horrifying as the notion of being sedated and then killed by the methodical removal of vital organs might sound, the paper noted that organs have been removed from people who are not brain-dead for the past 20 years. The quality of the organs removed this way is considerably higher than waiting for brain death to be formally declared.

“If the purpose of the death requirement is to maintain public trust and protect patients, can the spirit of that rule be done through other means? Our group would argue that it could be done through other means, if it was done thoughtfully in terms of upstream safeguarding with people who are competent and able to provide first-person consent,” said Canadian critical care doctor Carter Winberg, one of the paper’s authors.

Other doctors interviewed by the National Post expressed various moral and practical reservations to the idea – from sheer revulsion at the thought of killing an unconscious person by carving their vital organs out, to fears that the Canadian public might be shaken out of its support for MAID by organ harvesting.

University of Toronto bioethicist Kerry Bowman made the point that some people who request MAID change their minds before the fatal day arrives and they might feel pressured to go through with dying if they knew their organs were expected by people who were struggling to survive.

“Some have said to me, ‘I take more than I give. Everyone takes care of me. I don’t give anything back.’ I worry about the psychology of that, in a lot of ways,” Bowman said.

This is actually a fairly old argument that dates back to the early days of MAID, when the notion of accepting organ donations from euthanasia victims under any circumstances made some Canadian doctors very nervous. They argued that if organ donation was on the table under any circumstances, including the traditional approach of waiting for brain death, people might feel pressured into choosing MAID for the greater good.

In 2023, the Catholic Register feared that organ donation would “glorify the unthinkable” by causing MAID candidates to feel as if they were making a heroic sacrifice. Since Canada frequently boasts of the high level of organ donation by its MAID patients, it was not unreasonable to wonder if organ donation was contributing to the high number of Canadians who opted to kill themselves.

In January 2026, U.S. Deputy Health and Human Services Secretary Jim O’Neill blasted the “strange new horror” unleashed by Canada’s combination of MAID and organ donations.

O’Neill noted that the American organ donation system was reeling from several reports of organs almost being harvested from live patients, so it was particularly disturbing to see Canada boasting about how many organs it was retrieving from MAID patients. He would presumably be even more disturbed to learn that Canada was considering organ harvesting from live, but voluntarily doomed, patients as a matter of policy.