Non-profit organ procurement groups push hospitals to harvest donor organs prematurely: report

A report out from The New York Times confirms what many people fear when it comes to being an organ donor in the United States: sometimes medical professionals will value your organs more than your life. People across the US have experienced "rushed or premature attempts to remove their organs," including from patients who were crying or showing other signs of life.

Organ procurement organizations are non-profits with government contracts to arrange and coordinate transplants. The Times found that these groups sometimes rush doctors into doing organ harvesting while a patient is still potentially able to recover. In 2020, the Department of Health and Human Services said it would begin grading procurement organizations on how many transplants they arranged. If procurement groups didn't meet the threshold, they would see an end to their contracts. 

Per the Times: "The Times found that some organ procurement organizations — the nonprofits in each state that have federal contracts to coordinate transplants — are aggressively pursuing circulatory death donors and pushing families and doctors toward surgery. Hospitals are responsible for patients up to the moment of death, but some are allowing procurement organizations to influence treatment decisions.

"Fifty-five medical workers in 19 states told The Times they had witnessed at least one disturbing case of donation after circulatory death. Workers in several states said they had seen coordinators persuading hospital clinicians to administer morphine, propofol and other drugs to hasten the death of potential donors."

The way the number of transplants was increased was through a change in how death was quantified. The patients who are most likely to be prematurely targeted for their organs are people who are in a coma, have some brain function, are on life support, but are not expected to recover. This practice is called "donation after circulatory death." That kind of organ donation resulted in a full third of the organs donated in 2024, about 20,000 total. This is a stark increase from the number of donated organs just five years prior.

Such was the case, the Times found, with 42-year-old Misty Hawkins of Alabama, who had choked to death. When doctors cut her open to take her organs, they found her heart was still beating. In New Mexico, a woman was regaining consciousness while doctors made plans to harvest her organs. She eventually did regain consciousness. In Florida, a man was removed from life support despite crying and biting on his breathing tube as they did so. A paralyzed West Virginia man was asked by coordinators for permission to harvest his organs as he was waking up from surgery.

A Kentucky man who had been declared brain dead woke up on the operating table in 2021 as surgeons were about to divvy up his organs and give them to someone else. A federal investigation found that a non-profit that works to procure organs for those who need them actually pushed hospital workers to go and try to take the man's organs while he was still in need of them. 

It turns out that this man was not the only patient whose life was callously disregarded by the non-profit. That non-profit, responsible for coordinating the logistics between organ donor, hospital, and organ recipient, had pushed for premature removal in dozens of cases. A federal investigation found that in 73 cases, "officials should have considered stopping sooner because the patients had high or improving levels of consciousness." While some of those patients did die, others recovered and left the hospital.

About 170 million people are registered as organ donors in the United States and in many states, a person can opt in to be an organ donor and have that appear on their driver's license or non-driver ID card. Those who opt to be organ donors may have their organs save lives or those organs may be used for medical research.

There are over 100,000 people on the national transplant list waiting for an organ and over 48,000 organ transplants were done in the US in 2024. Most people who need organs, nearly 90,000, are in need of kidneys. About 10,000 need a liver, 3,500 need a new heart.