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Organ donation after euthanasia is already occurring, legally, in Canada. About 30 people who have died by “medical assistance in dying,” or MAID, since the law decriminalizing the act was passed in 2016 have consented to donate kidneys or other organs. In Ontario, 168 more have donated tissues such as corneas, skin, veins, tendons and ligaments — tissues that don’t require the same conditions as organs to survive and can be taken up to 24 hours after death.

However, under the long-standing “dead donor rule,” organs can’t be procured until donors are declared dead — typically, five minutes after the heart has stopped beating — and the organ retrieval itself can’t lead to the death of the donor.

The rule is intended to maintain a “firewall” between the team removing a person from life support — and determining death — and the transplant surgeons waiting to retrieve precious, desperately needed organs.

In such cases it may be ethically preferable to procure the patient’s organs in the same way that organs are procured from brain-dead patients

However, a Western University doctor and Harvard Medical School bioethicist and paediatrician argue that firewall may be less important when it comes to people choosing to die by euthanasia.

“Although some patients may want to be sure that organ procurement won’t begin before they are declared dead, others may want not only a rapid, peaceful and painless death, but also the option of donating as many organs as possible and in the best condition possible,” they wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine. “Following the dead donor rule could interfere with the ability of these patients to achieve their goals.