The article mentions neither Ukraine nor harvesting organs from living people.
The pro-Russian segment of the Internet is spreading news that The New York Times is supposedly proposing to «expand the definition of death» in order to harvest organs for transplantation from living people in Ukraine. The propagandists write that this will allow doctors not to provide medical care to the wounded, but instead to prematurely declare death and make money by selling organs abroad. Without any evidence the Russians speculate that in fact this practice has long been widespread in Ukraine, but now it is planned to officially legalize it.
However, of course, these speculations are completely divorced from the real article in The New York Times. The article by American cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar and the heads of the Heart Failure and Transplantation Center Snehal Patel and Deane Smith, entitled Donor Organs Are Too Rare. We Need a New Definition of Death mentions absolutely nothing about Ukraine — the doctors write about the American context, since each country has its own legislation on organ transplantation. Of course, they do not propose to remove organs from still living people. The doctors talk about a procedure that is widely used in Europe and allows you to keep organs in a condition suitable for transplantation for a longer time: it involves restarting the heart after it has stopped irreversibly. Thus, although some functions of the patient’s body can be activated again, it is impossible to return the person to independent life. Currently, this method is met with resistance from an ethical and legal point of view: if a person’s heart is working, can they really be considered dead? However, the authors of the article propose to expand the definition of death in the legislation to eliminate this conflict.
Doctors emphasize that the procedure can be performed only when there is no doubt that it is impossible to return a person to independent life. This will significantly increase the number of donors, while many patients with serious illnesses die while waiting for a transplant. The authors also emphasize that the potential for abuse of the system does exist, and stress the importance of measures to ensure strict adherence to the protocol by doctors. So, the article is not actually about removing organs from living people, but about a more efficient and effective way to perform transplantation and the aspects of American law that need to be adjusted for this.
The topic of so-called «black transplantology» has been featured in Russian propaganda for many years. Detector Media notes that the first fakes on this topic appeared at least eleven years ago, back in the early days of the Revolution of Dignity. Then the Russian media wrote that Euromaidan participants were killing people and harvesting their organs for sale. In previous articles, we have already explained why this conspiracy theory is not grounded in reality: organ transplantation is a complex procedure that requires extremely fast execution and compatibility of the donor with the recipient in many factors. Therefore, the idea that organs from random Ukrainians are being removed and even exported abroad for sale is absurd.
We also refuted fakes on this topic in the stories Fake: Ukraine Sold More Than Million Liters of Donor Blood Abroad, Fake: 38 Bodies of Ukrainian Soldiers Found in Dnipro, Some Missing Organs, and Fake: Ukrainian POW Forced to Sign Posthumous Organ Donation Consent by Commander.
