By Christina Lamb and Daniel Wainstock Judith Butler once wrote, “Precisely because a living being may die, it is necessary to care for that being so that it may live. Only under conditions in which the loss would matter does the value of the life appear.” As the Assisted Dying (AD) debate progresses following its […]
Category: death and/or dying
Thoraco-Abdominal Normothermic Regional Perfusion: Can the dead “beheaded” donor be killed?
By Christos Lazaridis. Thoraco-abdominal normothermic regional perfusion (TA-NRP) is a relatively novel technique for donation after the circulatory determination of death (DCDD). In short, after declaration of death by circulatory criteria (as in conventional DCDD), the circulation to the brain is surgically excluded followed by extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) and perfusion of the thoracoabdominal organs. […]
Hidden harms and the death of Alexei Navalny
By Johnna Wellesley. “Life makes no sense if you have to tolerate endless lies.” (Navalny) The sudden death of imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on 16 February 2024 in an Arctic penal colony was felt around the world. Responding to the announcement from the Federal Penitentiary Service, his wife, Yulia, addressed the Munich Security […]
Survival, dying well and intensive care
By Thomas Donaldson. Intensive care (ICU) medicine is amazing. When a disease causes a patient to become critically ill because their lungs, kidneys or cardiovascular system have started to fail, ICU treatments can take over the job of these organ systems to provide extra time for them to recover. Intensive care treatment has prevented the […]
Additional factors tending against the prosecution of suspects in cases of ‘mercy killings’ ought to concern all sides of the debate
By Rebecca Limb. Assisted dying is unlawful in England and Wales. To end or assist in the ending of another’s life out of compassion for and/or at the direction of the victim is not a defence to murder. A suspect will be prosecuted where there is sufficient evidence and it is in the public interest […]
Consensual lethal organ harvesting: dissecting ‘double effect donation’
By Anthony McCarthy and Helen Watt. Imagine I am an altruistic person in good health who is struck by how many people my organs (heart, lungs etc) could save if I became a live donor. Perhaps my life is not going well, and I want to make a greater contribution to society than I have […]
Are terminally ill patients disabled?
By Philip Reed. Asked to name groups of individuals who commonly face discrimination, most of us would probably come up with roughly the same list: racial minorities, people with disabilities, certain religious groups, women, and LGBTQ persons. If we have extra time to think, we might also mention heightism, sizeism, and lookism as lesser-known or […]
Overcoming impediments to medically assisted dying: A signal for another approach?
By Juergen Dankwort. The proposal to provide assistance with voluntary assisted dying (VAD) has grown significantly over the past two decades at an accelerating rate. Right-to-die movement societies and organizations now number over 80 from around the world, 58 of which are members of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies. However, most are […]
The ethics of OrganEx
By Richard B. Gibson. Nature recently published a study by a team at Yale University in which the circulation and cellular activity of a pig’s vital organs – pancreas, liver, kidney, heart, lungs, and even brain – were restored over an hour after death. While exploratory, the study’s results are nonetheless remarkable, challenging the intuition […]
Who gets to decide when I can’t? End of life decision-making and deceased donation
By Dominique E. Martin and Shih-Ning Then Most of us have ideas about how we want decisions to be made at the end of our lives, and some of us also have strong views about donating our organs and tissues after we die. Many of us appoint a loved one to make decisions on our […]