The Human Person Is Not a Commodity

“He started to cry. He moved. He was alive.”

That’s how one doctor described a patient who was about to have his organs harvested. Federal investigators have now confirmed dozens of such cases in Kentucky, where donation procedures were pushed forward despite signs of consciousness: thrashing, moaning, tears. In one case, the patient survived.

The scandal is staggering. Doctors and organ procurement officials were allegedly pressured to begin harvesting before patients were legally or morally dead. Families, grieving and vulnerable, were encouraged to consent to donation under ambiguous and sometimes coercive conditions. It’s horrifying, but it should not be surprising.

The Loss of Reverence

At the heart of this scandal is a terrifying loss of reverence for the human person. We are not free to treat ourselves or anyone else as raw material. The moment we begin to view people as resources to be harvested, managed, or optimized, we have already rejected their dignity.

We talk a great deal about saving lives, about maximizing outcomes, about doing the most good for the most people. But once you start measuring human value in terms of usefulness, the weakest always lose. We stop seeing people as gifts. We start seeing them as tools.

This isn’t just a medical failure. It is a moral collapse.

Rethinking “Death” in Modern Medicine

Much of the recent scandal centers around Donation after Circulatory Death (DCD). But the problem runs deeper. Even brain death, long treated as the gold standard for organ procurement, deserves renewed moral scrutiny.

The Church has never definitively ruled on the legitimacy of brain death, and growing voices, including physicians, ethicists, and theologians, have questioned whether it truly signifies the death of the person. After all, the body remains warm. The heart continues to beat, often with assistance. The immune system functions. Pregnant women declared brain dead have sustained unborn children for months. Can we really say that death has occurred?

We are often told that brain death is the moment when the soul has left the body. But how could we know that? That is a metaphysical claim, and medicine is not equipped to make it. At most, brain death is a useful medical marker, not an infallible judgment about the state of the soul.

And DCD, which involves removing organs within minutes of the heart stopping, introduces even more uncertainty. The margin for error is razor thin. If we are wrong, even once, the result is the direct killing of an innocent person.

That is not an edge case. That is a moral line we must never cross.

Not Death, But Assisted Dying

Make no mistake: we are not harvesting organs from the dead. We are helping people die faster in order to claim their organs.

That distinction matters. It is the difference between a gift freely given and a life prematurely ended. Even if we believe that organ donation is good. When done ethically, it can be beautiful, but it cannot come at the cost of another life. Good ends never justify evil means.

And yet, in our current moral climate, such actions feel disturbingly predictable.

A Culture That Discards the Vulnerable

Why is this happening? Because we already devalue human life.

We end the lives of unborn children for convenience. We euthanize the sick and elderly to reduce costs and preserve comfort. We speak of “death with dignity” as if the dignity of a person depends on how, and when, they die. We traffic in the body parts of aborted babies. Organ harvesting from the nearly-dead is simply the next logical step.

It is all part of the same moral sickness: reducing the person to their productivity, their desirability, their cost. And once we have done that, we can justify almost anything.

This is not compassion. This is calculus.

We Must Remember Who We Are

If we want to fix this, we have to go deeper than protocols and checklists. We must recover the truth that every human person is sacred. Not useful. Not convenient. Sacred.

Every person bears the image of God, from the weakest child to the dying patient. Every person is willed, known, and loved. Our dignity does not depend on our usefulness. It depends on our nature.

We are not gods. We are not in control of life and death. And the more we try to be, the more inhuman we become.

It is time to stop measuring people by their parts. It is time to see again the mystery, the beauty, and the inviolable dignity of the human person.

We should each ask ourselves, do I believe that every human life has value simply because it exists, regardless of age, ability, or awareness?

And if so, what changes in how I speak, vote, or care for others?