Doctors’ radical plan to tackle organ shortage: Patients could be kept alive to become donors and hearts retrieved from newborn babies in controversial BMA proposals

Jennifer Miller
Bio Ethics International

[Denis Campbell, Guardian] Patients could be kept alive solely so they can become organ donors, hearts could be retrieved from newborn babies for the first time, and body parts could be taken from high-risk donors as part of an urgent medical and ethical revolution to ease Britain’s chronic shortage of organs, doctors’ leaders say .

Hearts could also be taken from recently deceased patients and restarted in those needing a cardiac transplant, under controversial proposals from the British Medical Association intended to stop up to 1,000 people a year dying because of the country’s chronic shortage of organs.

Read More: Doctors’ radical plan to tackle organ shortage: Patients could be kept alive to become donors and hearts retrieved from newborn babies in controversial BMA proposals