The announcement on television and radio by J Radcliffe-Richards on behalf of the International Forum for Transplant Ethics (preceding the group's Lancet paper ), suggesting that patients in permanent vegetative state (PVS), in whom a court had given consent to withdrawal of treatment, could be given a lethal injection to expedite death so that their organs can be removed for transplantation must be challenged
The use of a lethal injection to terminate the life of an individual who is clearly alive although without cognitive brain function and in whom established brain death criteria are not fulfilled is to be deplored, however well meant. The proposal suggests euthanasia and, even worse, smacks of the activities of totalitarian regimes.
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