“But what is death? It depends.”

Bioethicists want “experts” to redefine death to harvest your organs and supply the government’s monopoly on the distribution of human organs. To quote from the article:

In light of all this, I suggest it is time to reconsider the constraints of the DDR, time to think about harvesting organs from some living patients – those who persistently fail to maintain consciousness before the brain is technically dead.

…Even if conscious, such patients could be given analgesia or anaesthesia to prevent pain during organ procurement – and their organs could be put to good use.

…In some circumstances, when donation is a high priority for an individual, we could even remove organs from those with full capacity for consciousness whose lives might go on and on in deep suffering and pain. Among the candidates include those with locked-in syndrome and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, where degenerating motor neurons render the person increasingly paralysed and unable to move.

“High priority,” in this case, refers to the overabundance of sick people waiting for healthy organs that are not being supplied. The organ shortage is created by government because people have no economic incentive to donate their organs, hence they are not incentivized to do anything but take their healthy organs with them into death. To quote David Howden from the Mises Institute:

In blood and organ markets the relevant price is set at zero, since one is not allowed to sell them for pecuniary gain. Like other similar markets (like rent controlled apartments), there is a large amount of people who want organs when the price is free and very few want to give them away. It’s not just an economic disaster, but a healthcare one as well.

This is nightmarish stuff for a whole host of reasons, among them being the fact that diseases or conditions that may render persons chronically ill – such a Lyme disease or spinal cord compression – are often misdiagnosed as ALS and other degenerative muscular diseases. If we are witnessing, as Walter Block has written, “a current system that enables medical bureaucrats to play God,” wait until these same bureaucrats can anoint so-called experts to determine that humans are “dead enough” for their body parts to be harvested and handed out to recipients according to bureaucratic decree.