Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. On March 26, 25-year-old Noelia Castillo-Ramos was put to death. By the Spanish government. She had not committed any crime.
In fact, she had been the victim of a horrendous crime. Back in 2022, Ramos was sexually assaulted by a group of men, which compounded her existing mental health struggles and led to at least two suicide attempts. One of those attempts left her with permanent injury and constant pain.
So eventually she appealed to die by euthanasia, which had been legalized in Spain in 2021. For two years her parents tried to save her with the help of a Christian law group, but in the end, it was the government and medical authorities that determined her life was not worth living. One of her friends was even prevented from saying goodbye to Ramos out of fear that she'd convince her to change her mind and then want to live. And authorities had reason to fear that outcome. According to one of her lawyers, Ms.
Ramos had sought a six-month extension, but her request had been denied. Quote, the hospital pressured for euthanasia because her organs were already committed, end quote.
Now this story includes almost everything that's wrong with the so-called death with dignity movement. She was the victim of a crime, but was punished instead. She needed help, but was instead helped to die. Her wishes to live longer were denied under the guise of saving more lives. The State preempted the authority of her parents, and the relationship of her friends, and in the end she was killed for her organs.
And all of that is just part of the story. Back in 1978, Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, directed a TV movie called Coma. It starred Michael Douglas playing a young medical student who discovers that otherwise healthy young people were slipping into comas because a group of doctors hoped to harvest their organs. It was an early example of just how prophetic Hollywood art can be. For example, in a recent New York Times op-ed, a group of doctors called for what they called an expanded definition of death.
So that more organs could be harvested. In response, a UK whistleblower offered the following description of all that that would actually mean: quote, you cannot take organs from a cadaver. The best organ donors have a beating heart, a circulation, under 30 years old, and ideally on a ventilator. Basically, someone's being murdered to give someone else organs. The entire braindead scenario is a lie.
⁇ Well, ethical scenarios like this were quite unthinkable until quite recently in human history. Just a few decades ago, a broken or diseased organ was basically a death sentence. Back in 1967, doctors pulled off the first successful heart transplant. And since, thousands of lives have been saved through organ transplantation and donation. And yet, this groundbreaking medical innovation has become a crisis.
The ability to transplant organs has become a shortage of organs. Because there are people who can be saved, we are now told that some people should die. This kind of moral reductionism of human beings is both degrading and dangerous. As Wesley J. Smith said at National Review in response to the New York Times piece, and I quote, we must not yield to the utilitarian temptation in healthcare.
Pretending that a patient is dead does not make him deceased. This proposal, and others like it, have the awful potential to seriously corrode trust in the ethics of transplant medicine among an already wary public, end quote. What he called the utilitarian temptation is essentially the idea that if we can do something, we must do something, that the end justifies the means. Obviously, the Bible's silent on something like organ donation, but it rejects pragmatic approaches to moral decisions, especially when those decisions are about what constitutes a human being. In the biblical view, humans can never be reduced to mere bodies, nor can bodies be reduced to disposable and unimportant flesh.
In his book, Bioethics, A Primer for Christians, Gil Mylander called this, and I quote, the sort of slippery slope on which we stand if we permit ourselves to believe that ours is the godlike responsibility of bringing good out of every human tragedy, end quote. What that means for us is that struggling through these difficult questions about things like the meaning of death and organ donation is not optional for the church. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, we need good ethics if for no other reason than bad ethics exist. Christians who believe that God can make dead people alive should be the first to push back on playing God with life and death.
For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Dr. Timothy Padgett. If Breakpoint helps you think clearly about the issues of our culture, would you leave us a review wherever you download your podcast? And for more resources or to share this commentary with others, go to breakpoint.org.
Hi, listeners. Remember that Colson Fellows program applications are open through July 15th. Get a Head Start today and apply now before the rush. Does the program sound interesting to you, but you're wondering about the time and investment required? Listen to Haley, a 2024 fellow, share how she decided to jump into the program as a busy homeschool mom and church member.
For me, it was being creative with my time.
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You can request more information about the program, sign up for an informational webinar, and fill out an application today at colsonfellows.org. That's colsonfellows.org. Mm.
