It's the stuff of horror movies. “4367 the bidding now stands at $42,500, a 31-year-old male.”
In the movie Coma, doctors are putting patients into comas so they can harvest their body parts for money.
But medical ethicist Dr. David Prentice says doctors in Canada are suggesting this very thing – in real life. The proposed victims are people who have chosen physician assisted suicide. Prentice says with their consent, doctors would take out their body parts before they even die.
“That is probably the most horrifying and inhumane thing in this whole proposal, that we're not even going to wait until the people are dead to harvest the organs. We're going to intentionally kill them by harvesting their organs,” Prentice said.
Some Canadian doctors share Prentice’s concerns. The Canadian parliament passed legislation in 2022 making it a crime for Canadians to travel abroad to receive an organ taken without consent.
Money factors in
Prentice says insurance companies and some hospitals in states or countries that allow assisted suicide already push for it because it's cheaper than treating the disease.
“A couple of folks had repeatedly been urged to go through the process of this medically assisted dying. Why would they be urged to do that? Well, we're going to save some money again.”
Prentice says it's a small step to coercing or pressuring people whose illnesses might not be terminal to choose assisted suicide so the organ donation industry can make more money.
“Well, we can harvest all of these organs, maybe even sell them to the highest bidder, then we want to get more people into that pipeline.”
