Big Controversy
– Doctors, Death, and Ethics

“Redefine death.” That was the headline three New York doctors chose for their New York Times op-ed — and it’s exactly what they intend to do.

According to The American Spectator (Aug. 5, 2025), the authors — physicians at Northwell Health — argued that “donor organs are too rare” and that the only real solution is legal: to broaden the definition of death. They wrote that America “must figure out how to obtain more healthy organs” by rewriting what it means to be dead.

The proposal surfaced just as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) uncovered what it called a “systemic disregard for the sanctity of life” inside the nation’s organ-transplant system. The Spectator reported that federal investigators found cases where organs were taken “prematurely — some from patients who were still gasping, crying, or showing signs of life.”

For doctors on the front lines, those words cut deep. Dr. Joseph Varon, president of the Independent Medical Alliance, told The Epoch Times (Oct. 13, 2025) that the profession is “jumping the gun.” He said he has personally witnessed transplant teams arrive “before the patient is even dead.” During one lung-examination procedure, a supposedly brain-dead donor started coughing. “I looked at the nurses and said, ‘This person is not dead.’”

Varon warned that hospitals are turning death itself into an administrative call. “Instead of trying to save the patient,” he said, “they start calling the transplant team.” He blamed a culture that rewards hospitals for the number of organs they extract rather than the lives they save.

The Spectator notes that the very concept of brain death — the standard used since 1968 — was originally developed alongside the rise of transplant medicine. Now, as donor numbers decline, some doctors want to go further: declare irreversibly comatose patients dead even while their hearts and lungs still function.

That would erase the thin line separating organ transplanting from organ harvesting.

The proposed change would make current controversies disappear overnight. Under the new standard, doctors wouldn’t have to wait for the heart to stop before removing it. The ethical debate, as one op-ed author put it, would simply become “moot.”

To critics like Varon, that word is chilling. “We are getting infected,” he said, warning that the same moral shortcuts appearing in America echo practices abroad, where organs are taken from people long before they are gone. “If a person isn’t truly dead,” Varon added, “what you have is a huge ethical violation.”

It’s a story of definitions — and consequences. A few words in a legal statute could decide whether a body on a table is a patient to be saved or a resource to be mined.

Next: how those same moral shortcuts became industrialized inside China’s prisons.

Sources
– The American Spectator – Aug. 5, 2025 – https://spectator.org/amid-systemic-scandal-doctors-want-to-broaden-the-definition-of-death-for-organ-harvesting/

– The Epoch Times – Oct. 13, 2025 – https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/the-erosion-of-ethics-in-modern-transplant-medicine-dr-joseph-varon-5927721