A Doctor Hastens a Patient's Death for Transplant Organs

Ruben Navarro's mother was a Guatamalan immigrant. Her son had an unusual disease diagnosed when he was nine. As an adult, he fell unconscious and was taken to the hospital. Instead of trying to save his life, a transplant specialist was called in to harvest his kidneys and liver for transplant. The specialist, Dr. Hootan Roozrokh, gave Navarro injections to hasten his death. Life support systems were removed, and Navarro still didn't die, so the doctor ordered more drugs. They killed him.

No matter how you juggle the words to try and make them say something else, no matter how lofty and dripping with respect the doctor and his lawyers who do the juggling, no matter how lowly or humble the circumstance of the patient; injecting a patient with drugs to make him die is still murder.

The doctors and hospital are worried that people will not offer their organs for transplant when they die if the doctor is convicted of three felony charges. These men are worried about the wrong thing and asking the wrong questions. If Navarro had been Dr. Roozrokh's son, would he have been treated in the same way?

The doctor's business is to heal the sick, not to kill them if their internal organs can be harvested. We all have the right to due process of law. No one in this country can arbitrarily decide that someone must die so their organs can be used on others. In this case, Dr. Roozrokh ordered so much of a harmful drug that the organs were damaged and useless anyway.

The doctors are in the wrong venue. They have no authority to kill anybody. Only a court of law can make such a determination in this country; and only under a system of due process of law which includes a trial and all the rights of Navarro to a lawyer, to be presented with witnesses in the case against him, cruel or unusual punishment being out of the question. Navarro commited no crime. He was killed for his organs in such a way that his organs were too damaged to be harvested anyway.

This is only one case. How many more are out there? The courts must send a strong message to the medical establishment that the same laws that apply to the rest of us apply to them.

A recent argument that has begun to appear in the media for doctors playing God is that they can now create life. They can't create life. The life is already there in the cells they are playing with. They didn't create life and can't create it.

The facts from this article in the first paragraph are from The New York Times - Wednesday, February 27