A 16-year-old girl with a brain tumor has been euthanized in Belgium and her organs harvested. She’s not the first minor so killed in that country. And she won’t be the last.

Michael Cook asks cogent questions about the case. From the BioEdge story:

Can a 16-year-old truly give informed consent to her own death? Was she pressured to donate her organs? Was she made to feel that her life was useless unless she helped someone else by donating organs?

Those are important considerations. But this also caught my eye: Not only did she donate her organs as part of the procedure, but it is possible she was live-harvested prior to being killed. Look at this:

The euthanasia took place in a hospital and lasted 36 hours, according to Le Soir. First she was anaesthetized, then intubated and ventilated. Her organs were examined and advertised on the European donation network, Eurotransplant. Finally she received a lethal injection a few days after her 16th birthday.

Normally, in such (awful) cases, euthanasia is followed by organ-harvesting. The patient enters a hospital, is killed quickly by a lethal drug cocktail, wheeled into an adjoining surgical suite, and then the organs are procured in the usual manner from the dead donor. But if this report is correct, the girl was kept alive under sedation for 36 hours, opened up, and her organs examined! That’s monstrous. And I have to wonder whether some of the organs were removed before she was dispatched. I think that question needs to be asked too.

I mean, if you are going to treat her like an organ farm, why not go all the way? It’s worth noting here that euthanasia by organ-harvesting is already being discussed among bioethicists.

And even if she wasn’t live-harvested, this case clearly crossed a very serious ethical line. Keeping her alive for a day and a half — with her body cut open — wasn’t for her benefit. The organ-transplant community should be having a fit. Donors are never to be treated as anything less than fully equal patients.

Or are we so morally numb to the culture of death that it just doesn’t matter anymore?