Ireland is automatically putting adults on the organ donor list: "Perilous path"

If you are an adult Irish citizen, you are likely now a potential organ donor – whether you know it or not.

On June 17, the Human Tissue Act 2024 came into effect in Ireland. “Under this new legislation, all adults in Ireland will be considered to have agreed to be an organ donor when they die, unless they have recorded a decision not to donate on the National Organ Donation Opt-Out Register or are in one of the excluded groups,” Ireland’s Health Service Executive (HSE) announced.

The new law, which is referred to as a “soft opt-out organ donation system,” automatically includes every Irish citizen over the age of 18 on the organ donor list, although health officials stated that families will be consulted before the organs of a loved one are harvested. According to the HSE website: “A person’s organs can be donated after: brain stem death; cardiac death. In both of these cases, there is no hope of recovery.”

There is, to say the least, significant debate amongst ethicists about that conclusion. Pro-life ethicists emphasize that “complete and irreversible brain death” is the moment of death itself; as the Irish media outlet Gript emphasized in an editorial earlier this month, there is reason to be skeptical of the government’s move:

In parts of the United States, some doctors have moved to take patients off life support despite signs of improving consciousness, in order to harvest their organs– at the behest of organ donation non-profit groups. While in many of these cases, doctors must end the procedure before it begins due to patients experiencing sudden recoveries – there are worrying cases in which federal investigations ruled doctors should not have harvested patients’ organs due to signs of high levels of consciousness.

At the Iona Institute, a conservative Irish think tank, Dr. Angelo Bottone also noted the spectre of “organ donation euthanasia,” which is now practiced in countries like the Netherlands and Belgium.

“While donation after euthanasia is already happening in those countries, doctors are now discussing harvesting organs before  euthanasia patients are declared dead, in order to preserve organ viability,” Bottone wrote. “They propose that organs be removed under general anaesthesia before the patient is declared dead, thereby maintaining continuous blood circulation and oxygenation to the organs until the moment of retrieval. This method could significantly improve the quality and quantity of organs available for transplantation.”