Liverpool Care Pathway - Nazifying The NHS

People killed by euthanasia in Belgium are having their organs harvested for transplant surgery, a new report has revealed.

Eurotransplant, a co-ordination group for transplants in Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Slovenia, is now devising elaborate protocols for ‘organ donation and transplantation after euthanasia’. Dr Peter Saunders, of Care Not Killing, an umbrella group of more than 50 British medical, disability and religious charities opposed to euthanasia, said he was shocked by the report.

‘I was amazed at how nonchalantly the issue was dealt with as if killing patients and then harvesting their organs was the most natural thing in the world,’ he said.

‘Given that half of all euthanasia cases in Belgium are involuntary it must be only a matter of time before the organs are taken from patients who are euthanised without their consent.

‘The matter of fact way the retrieval process is described in the paper is particularly chilling and shows the degree of collaboration that is necessary between the euthanasia team and the transplant surgeons – prep them for theatre next to the operating room, then kill them and wheel them in for organ retrieval. All in a day’s work in Brave New Belgium.’

He added: ‘Doctors there now do things that those doctors in most other countries would find absolutely horrific.’

The report comes just a year after researchers found a high proportion of deaths classified as euthanasia in Belgium have involved patients who have not requested their lives to be ended by a doctor.

A fifth of nurses interviewed by researchers from the Canadian Medical Association Journal admitted that they had been involved in the euthanasia of a patient – but also found that nearly half of these – 120 of 248 – admitted to participating in ‘terminations without request or consent’.

Belgium became the second in the world after the Netherlands to legalise euthanasia since the fall of Nazi Germany.