If you’re a registered organ donor in Australia, read this before you renew your licence.
You might change your mind. You might not. Either way, you should know what you’re signing up for.
Two Facts That Shouldn’t Be Next to Each Other
Victoria’s assisted dying law has just been loosened. Doctors can now raise killing with dying patients. (See When Your Doctor Suggests You Should Die.)
Separately: in Europe, organ donation from assisted dying patients is booming. Spain went from 7 cases in 2021 to 42 the year after. That’s a sixfold jump. In Canada, the Netherlands and Belgium, 286 euthanasia patients donated organs up to 2021, and that yielded 837 transplants. By 2024 there were 30,000 euthanasia procedures a year worldwide.
Put those two facts together and you’ve got a medical system that now has two reasons to talk you into dying, and a financial interest in how quickly you do it.
A heart transplant bills out around $190,000 US. Organ procurement in the US alone runs as a $1 billion-a-year operation. The average organ procurement organisation takes home $2.3 million a year in profit. Grows its assets about 9% a year.
Still feel good about the little pink dot on the licence? Stay with me.
Brain Death Was Invented in 1968
Before 1968, dead meant dead. Heart stopped. Blood cold. End of story.
In December 1967, Christiaan Barnard did the first heart transplant in Cape Town. That created an awkward problem. Was the donor dead when the heart came out? Or did taking the heart kill him?
Eight months later, August 1968, Harvard Medical School published A Definition of Irreversible Coma. A brand new kind of death. “Brain death.” Perfect for the new industry.
Sold as medical science. Really, a product spec. The problem was: we need a legal way to take organs from people whose hearts are still beating. The solution was: call them dead anyway.
The mainstream line will tell you the timing was coincidence. Two unrelated developments. Have a look at the calendar and tell me if you believe that.
Why Do Dead People Need Anaesthetic?
This is the bit that should make you put the beer down.
When they’re removing organs from a “brain dead” patient:
- 90% get neuromuscular blockers — drugs that stop the body moving
- 63% get general anaesthetic
- 34% get opioids, usually fentanyl, for pain
Stop and read that again.
They give fentanyl. For pain. To a dead person.
They give Nimbex. To stop movement. Of a dead person.
The official line is that the drugs keep the organs in good nick. That doesn’t pass common sense. Paralysing drugs don’t preserve organs — they stop the patient thrashing when the knife goes in. Opioids don’t preserve organs — they stop the patient responding to pain.
If the patient is dead, you don’t need either. The drugs are there because the patient isn’t as dead as the paperwork says.
Only a Quarter of Doctors Follow the Protocol
Brain death has to be tested a particular way. There’s an apnoea test, where they pull the patient off the ventilator and see if they breathe. There’s a sequence of reflex checks. There’s a required wait after the drugs wear off.
A study of US doctors who do brain death testing found that only 25% follow the guidelines correctly. One in ten skip the apnoea test altogether — a test the guidelines say you must do.
That’s the qualified crowd. In the room, under pressure, with a family outside and a transplant team waiting.
One in four doing it right. Three in four cutting corners. You’d sack a sparky who wired a house to that standard. We let them declare death to that standard.
The Lazarus Effect — the One They Dismiss as a “Reflex”
A patient is declared brain dead. On the table, about to have their organs removed. Suddenly their arms come up and cross over their chest — the same move any human makes to protect themselves.
That’s the Lazarus effect. Named for the bloke Jesus raised from the dead, which tells you how the doctors viewing it for the first time reacted.
The official position? Just a spinal reflex. Doesn’t prove anything. Carry on.
How common is it? A medical study of 38 brain-dead patients found 39% showed spontaneous or reflex movements. Finger twitches, toes flexing, the full Lazarus sign with the arms crossing, face twitches. Published in Neurology, the top journal in the field.
Forty percent.
If you declared 40% of any other diagnosis wrong four times out of ten, you’d be struck off. In this one, it’s “doesn’t preclude the diagnosis.”
Oh — and medical guidelines recommend that families are not in the room during the apnoea test. Why? Because if a mum watches her son raise his arms when they pull the breathing tube, she’s going to stop the procedure. So keep her out.
“Independent Doctors” — Independent From What?
You’ll hear it a hundred times. “Two independent doctors sign off before any organs are taken.”
Fair enough. Independent from what?
Look at the actual rules. In Australia: two doctors, neither of whom is caring for the intended organ recipient. In the US: doctors who aren’t part of the transplant team.
Spot the gap?
Neither rule says the doctors have to be independent from the hospital that’s about to bill out a quarter of a million dollars for the transplant. Both doctors can, and usually do, work for the same outfit. Different departments — one neuro, one ICU — but the same pay cheque, the same boss, the same year-end bonus pool tied to the same revenue.
Now ask yourself: if one of those doctors kept saying “actually, this patient isn’t brain dead” every time an organ donation was on the cards — how long would he keep his job?
That’s not a trick question. We all know the answer. He’d last eighteen months, max, before being moved to a different unit or quietly performance-managed out the door.
It’s not that the doctors are wicked. It’s the Bullshit Rule again. They read the same guidelines. They do what everyone else is doing. They’ve got a mortgage. They’re not going to be the one bloke who blows up the department’s organ donation figures.
So “two independent doctors” means “two blokes the hospital can point at.” The word “independent” is doing no work at all.
The Cases They Don’t Want You Googling
These are real people. Real names. Real news coverage. None of this is theoretical.
Zack Dunlap, March 2008. Declared brain dead after an ATV accident. Heard the doctors discussing harvesting his organs while he lay paralysed and couldn’t respond. Recovered fully.
Val Thomas, May 2008. Declared brain dead. No brain waves for 17 hours. Family was discussing organ donation. She woke up and started chatting to the nurses.
An Australian woman, May 2011. Declared brain dead in a Victorian hospital. Family fought the doctors for weeks against recommendations to switch off the ventilator. She regained consciousness.
Colleen Burns, New York 2013. Declared brain dead. Woke up just as they were about to remove her organs.
Jahi McMath, 2013. Thirteen years old. Declared brain dead. Family refused to pull the plug. She kept growing. Went through puberty over several years. Dr Alan Shewmon, who’s studied this field for decades, said the obvious thing: “I’ve never heard of a corpse that underwent puberty before.”
Anthony Hoover. Declared brain dead. Crying and moving during the start of organ retrieval. Some clinicians in the room wanted to keep going anyway. Someone refused. If that someone hadn’t been there that day, Anthony would be dead.
Dr Shewmon has documented 175 cases of long-term survival after brain death declaration. Thirty of them were pregnant women whose bodies kept the babies alive for weeks or months after “death.” Some “corpses” maintained blood pressure, fought off infection, and grew.
Corpses don’t do any of those things. The dead bury the dead. They don’t gestate babies.
No One Is Counting
Here’s the kill shot. There is no national registry in the United States — or Australia — that tracks brain death misdiagnoses.
No spreadsheet. No tally. No KPI. No reporting obligation.
That’s not an oversight. That’s the design.
Because the moment you start counting, you’ve got evidence. The moment you don’t count, every one of Dr Shewmon’s 175 cases is an “anecdote.” An outlier. A one-off. Dismissible. Weird.
One corpse going through puberty is a miracle. A hundred and seventy-five corpses are a statistical pattern. So don’t count them. Problem solved.
The Online Opt-Out That Isn’t
Here’s the scam at the paperwork end.
You can update your organ donation status online. In Australia, through my.gov.au. In the US, through various state websites.
What nobody tells you: those online changes often don’t reach the DMV or licence record that the hospital uses as its authoritative proof. Hospitals ring the state database and get the old answer. Your new answer is sitting on a separate screen nobody checked.
The Right To Fight Facebook group is full of Aussie and American families who hit this. A man named Jay had a sudden brain aneurysm. His wife had already pulled him off the donor register online. She’d even warned him. Doctors declared him brain dead within the weekend. His wife saw him crying. She refused consent repeatedly. The procurement team went and got consent from someone else in the family anyway.
If you’ve changed your status online and you think that’s the end of it, it’s probably not the end of it.
What You Actually Have to Do
If after reading this you still want to donate — good on you. Real transplants save real lives. The surgeons aren’t the enemy. The system around them is.
If you’ve decided you don’t want to donate, here’s the list. Do all five:
1. Screenshot your donor status. After you update it online, take a screenshot. Date visible. Keep it.
2. Email the screenshot to your family. Multiple people. Your spouse. Your kids. Your sibling. People who will be in the room when it matters.
3. Record a short video. Thirty seconds on your phone. Your face, your name, the date, the words: “I do not consent to organ donation. I do not authorise the removal of any organs or tissues from my body after death.” Send it to your family.
4. Put it in writing. Signed, dated. A copy in your important-papers file. A copy with family.
5. Tell them their rights. If you’re ever declared brain dead, your family has the right to refuse, demand time, bring in doctors from a different hospital, and insist on being in the room during any test.
If you don’t give your family that ammo, they’ll be facing authoritative, grieving, rushed decision-making under pressure. The nice doctor in the nice coat saying it’s what you would have wanted. Someone else on a waiting list who needs it more. The family will crack. That’s how these things work.
Where This Is Going
The safeguards erode in the same order, every time. First, doctors can’t raise it. Then they can. Then they must. First, assisted dying is for the terminal. Then the chronically ill. Then the depressed. Then the poor. Then anyone who says they’re tired.
At every step, the people running it will tell you it’s compassionate. Dignified. A gift.
At every step, there’ll be someone in the back office doing the numbers on how many organs came out of this year’s program versus last year’s.
You don’t have to be against transplants to be against a system that profits from your death and isn’t counting its own mistakes. You just have to be awake.
Be awake. Tell your family. Screenshot your status. Record the video.
Because once you’re in that bed and the pink dot is on file, the people making money off your organs will be in the room. The people who love you might not be. And by the time they realise something’s off — if they ever do — it’s too late.
This post is part of the Life & Death thread on Common Sense Australia — where we look at what gets replaced when something natural is swapped for something engineered, and who pays for the swap.
Leave a Reply