Has Canada’s MAiD Program Become a Pipeline for Organ Harvesting?

The gruesome saga of Canada’s so-called “medical assistance in dying” (MAiD) regime reached a dark new milestone recently as a healthy heart from someone who was euthanized in Canada was transplanted into another patient in the United States. While some healthcare professionals and assisted suicide proponents are hailing the transplant as a medical breakthrough, it nonetheless raises serious ethical questions about the abuse of MAiD programs as a mechanism for organ harvesting.

According to the National Post, a healthy heart from a 38-year-old Canadian man who was euthanized was successfully “reanimated” and donated to a 59-year-old American man with heart failure. The euthanized individual was suffering from ALS, a progressive neurodegenerative disease that impairs muscle function and typically leads to death within 2-5 years, although a small number of people with ALS can live up to 20 years after diagnosis.

Surgeons from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and Ottawa Hospital called it a “landmark case” — the first successful heart transplant using an organ taken from a patient killed through Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program.

According to LifeSite News, while this was the first successful heart transplant from a MAiD patient, “Organs being harvested from freshly euthanized patients are becoming more common… there have already been liver, kidney, and lung transplants, and at least 155 people in Canada have donated their organs and tissues after receiving a doctor-administered lethal injection.”

The Canadian Parliament created MAiD in 2016 for adults whose deaths were “reasonably foreseeable.” In 2021, lawmakers dropped that restriction, opening eligibility to nearly anyone with a chronic or incurable condition. But that definition remains deliberately vague, and in many cases patients who are not on the brink of death have been pressured by doctors to agree to assisted suicide.

As AMAC Newsline previously reported, Canadian veterans revealed in 2022 that caseworkers at Veterans Affairs had pressured them to agree to assisted suicide not for terminal illness, but for PTSD and depression. In another case, a Canadian woman suffering from depression was offered assisted suicide due to a lack of hospital beds. The government later called those incidents “isolated.”

But as of 2024, about one in twenty Canadian deaths were state-sanctioned. Health Canada counted more than 15,000 euthanasia cases last year. Organ-donation agencies now work directly with MAiD providers, folding assisted suicide into the transplant system and turning what was once a rare exception into routine medical practice.

That partnership has made Canada a global leader in organ donation after euthanasia. A Dutch study found that of 286 cases of organ donation following assisted suicide worldwide by 2021, 136 were Canadian. The Canadian Institute for Health Information reported that five percent of all organ transplants last year used organs taken from euthanized patients.

Health officials now track euthanasia like any other procedure, issuing data tables and performance reports, refining the process for speed and consistency. The act of killing a patient has become, in bureaucratic language, a metric of success.

On its face, the idea sounds merciful: if a dying patient chooses to end their life, why not let their organs save another? The logic appeals to both emotion and efficiency — a final act of generosity that turns tragedy into hope.

But the undeniable reality is that tying organ donation to euthanasia creates perverse incentives that can insidiously overwhelm patient welfare.

Canada’s health system faces the same pressures as any bureaucracy: cut costs, clear waitlists, show results. Killing patients is cheaper than caring for them, and every euthanasia case spares the state long-term costs – in addition to potentially making organ donation companies and hospitals boatloads of money.

In 2020, the Parliamentary Budget Officer projected $62 million a year in “net savings” from expanding assisted suicide. The numbers look good on paper, but only because the moral cost doesn’t show up on a balance sheet. When success is measured in transplants or financial savings, the incentives tilt toward more death, not less.

Doctors and hospitals feel those pressures too. Transplant programs depend on measurable “success stories.” A smooth operation brings prestige and funding.

Ethicists have warned that this overlap can warp motives. A review by the Ottawa Hospital and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center cautioned that linking euthanasia to organ donation “may cause undue societal pressure for donation,” and that “the desire to become a donor may be a driver for the MAiD request.” A patient who already feels like a burden – but is not facing imminent death – may come to see death as their last contribution to society.

Euthanasia began in Canada as a promise of mercy. It has become a calculated medical service, tallied in spreadsheets and described in journals. A system once meant to preserve life now manages its end.

When life’s value depends on comfort or cost, it stops being sacred and becomes negotiable. As history shows, once a society starts negotiating the worth of life, the terms only grow looser.

To treat suicide as healthcare is to forget what medicine is for. The question for Canada, and for every nation tempted by its example, is not how efficiently euthanasia can be done and how many lives can be saved by taking one, but whether a health system that routinizes killing can ever truly know the value of life.

Sarah Katherine Sisk is a proud Hillsdale College alumna and a master’s student in economics at George Mason University. You can follow her on X @SKSisk76.