Right to Life NSW
Is this the way of the future? If so, we need to be concerned as many in organ transplant medicine and bioethics want permission to kill the profoundly cognitively disabled for their organs, either by lethal injection and then harvesting, or by the process itself.
Where it is inevitable that an incapacitous patient is going to die—and specifically when it has been agreed through the courts that a patient in a PVS is going to have CANH [tube-supplied sustenance] withdrawn, it could be in a patient’s best interests to have a drug that would stop their heart and to have vital organs donated to a family member, acting as a means to the end of saving another, much as the mother would be doing in running out on the road to save her son.
By extension, it could also be in the patients best interests to donate their organs to someone else, if that was consistent with their previously expressed wishes. (3) The current practice of withdrawing CANH from patients in PVS or minimally conscious state—with the inevitable consequence of death—is ethically inferior to actively ending life with a drug that would stop the heart. Read more here
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