The Department of Health and Human Services reports that the organ transplant system is compromised. “Our findings show that hospitals allowed the organ procurement process to begin when patients showed signs of life, and this is horrifying,” said Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “The organ procurement organizations that coordinate access to transplants will be held accountable. The entire system must be fixed to ensure that every potential donor’s life is treated with the sanctity it deserves.”

A House panel is now investigating, as well.

The medical field is full of people who do their jobs well, caring (deeply) for patients and lamenting every malady or misstep in treatment while working diligently to provide exactly the kind of care every patient wants and needs. I have many family members and friends who work or worked in the medical field, and they are excellent at what they do. The same could be said for countless others, as well.

Yet, sadly, it certainly wouldn’t be surprising to learn that the medical establishment has made a hash of organ donations. This same establishment badly mishandled the coronavirus pandemic (including denying organ transplants for some unvaccinated people), has been aborting millions of children for decades, is increasingly pushing to terminate the elderly or terminally ill, and has been profiting mightily from those suffering from gender pathology.

There is, after all, a lot of money to be made from organ transplants, and if donors need a little “encouragement,” well, maybe it’s best for everyone. At least that’s the allegation.

Thanks to the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act of 1968, when you get a driver’s license in all 50 states, one of the questions you answer is whether you’ll be an organ donor. Roughly 170 million Americans have chosen to do so. “There are currently more than 103,000 men, women and children on the national transplant waiting list,” Fox News reports. “Each day, 13 people die while waiting for an organ transplant.” There are 56 authorized procurement organizations nationwide.

According to Cornell Law School, “The [Uniform Anatomical Gift Act] was revised in 1987 and again in 2006. The revisions made in 2006 aimed to address shortages and encourage donation. The 2006 revised act expanded the list of persons who can consent to organ donation on behalf of an individual, gave every individual the opportunity to donate their organs at or near death, and stated that individuals who refuse to donate must explicitly state so.”

It seems it’s now opt-out. “What safeguards are in place?” asked commentator Matt Walsh. What prevents hospitals from letting a patient die of circulatory failure (or worse) to cash in on lucrative organ donations?

Maybe not enough. Walsh, The New York Times, The Washington Post, National Review, and others tell the stories of multiple patients who were (sometimes almost) subjected to surgical organ removal when that likely shouldn’t have happened. In some cases, the donor died; in others, they later recovered. One patient woke up on the operating table. Another was discovered to have a beating heart after the surgeon cut into her sternum; doctors stopped and stitched her up, but she later died.

Walsh noted that such stories “led the Trump administration to investigate the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, which administers the organ transplant program that Congress established.”

The aforementioned HHS report says that the Health Resources and Services Administration “examined 351 cases where organ donation was authorized, but ultimately not completed. It found:

• "103 cases (29.3%) showed concerning features, including 73 patients with neurological signs incompatible with organ donation.

• "At least 28 patients may not have been deceased at the time organ procurement was initiated — raising serious ethical and legal questions.

• "Evidence pointed to poor neurologic assessments, lack of coordination with medical teams, questionable consent practices, and misclassification of causes of death, particularly in overdose cases.”

These are all cases of “heart death” as opposed to “brain death,” which tends to be clearer.

Did the HHS investigation just happen to find the worst cases? Is it an overestimate of the problem nationwide? Again, I’m asking those questions of the same establishment responsible for COVID tyranny, abortion, euthanasia, and gender mutilation, so my presumption isn’t kind.

The irony is that these instances of abuse will cause more people to think twice about or decline to be organ donors, which will leave those in need without hope. Organ recipients may always wonder if someone was killed to save their life.

My sometimes demented mind went to the hilarious “bring out your dead” sketch from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” The collector of dead bodies arrived to find a man protesting that he was still alive, though he was being carried by another man who wanted to be rid of him. “I feel fine,” the poor fellow insisted. “I think I’ll go for a walk.” The man with the cart soon whacked him on the head with a club so he could be taken on the cart to the morgue.

Like other Monty Python humor, that was supposed to be comedy, not an instruction manual. In real life, of course, it’s not even remotely funny.

In fact, the problem is precisely what Kennedy alluded to: Our society no longer values the sanctity of life. We’ve devalued it to the point of prioritizing “quality” or “convenience” over upholding the fact that we are each created in the image of God. Our Declaration of Independence, which will turn 250 in a year, recognizes that our Creator “endowed” us with “certain unalienable Rights,” and “that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The more our society deviates from and outright rejects the Judeo-Christian values upon which our Republic was built, the more we’re going to hear horrific stories about the way people are treated and killed for profit.

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