Hospitals Are Using ‘Circulatory Death’ To Harvest Organs Of LIVING People
by Heidi Klessig, M.D. | Lifesite October 16th, 2025 6:19 AM

It is long past time for complete transparency about organ procurement practices, and for mandating fully informed consent when people register to become organ donors.




(LifeSiteNews) — “Our findings show that hospitals allowed the organ procurement process to begin when patients showed signs of life, and this is horrifying,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in a recent press release. “The organ procurement organizations that coordinate access to transplants will be held accountable. The entire system must be fixed to ensure that every potential donor’s life is treated with the sanctity it deserves.”
This statement came on the heels of a New York Times article highlighting multiple cases of organ donors who were not dead. The article focused on an organ procurement practice known as “donation after circulatory death,” or DCD. DCD donors are not “brain dead,” but have a poor prognosis and are either not expected to survive or have decided that their quality of life is unacceptable. DCD deaths are a planned event, coordinated to occur at a specific time and place to allow organ procurement.
Here’s how it works: before proceeding to organ donation, DCD donors are given a “do not resuscitate” (DNR) order. This is necessary because these patients could be resuscitated, but a decision has been made not to do so. Their treatment switches from patient-focused care to organ-focused care, often including placement of large-bore intravenous lines and infusions of medications for the benefit of the organs, not the patient.
On their final day, DCD donors are taken to surgery and removed from life support. Once they become pulseless, doctors observe a two to five minute “no touch” period to observe for any spontaneous return of circulation. Organ removal begins as quickly as possible thereafter, because warm organs rapidly become unsuitable for transplantation in the absence of circulation.
READ: ‘Brain death’ was invented to harvest more organs
But are these people actually dead following just two to five minutes of pulselessness? It is well docuмented that people are routinely resuscitated within this timeframe, but in the case of DCD donors a decision has been made not to do so.
A review in the medical literature shows that people have spontaneously recovered a heartbeat after as many as ten minutes of cardiac arrest, with some of these people making a full recovery. Thus, DCD donors are not known to be dead after just two to five minutes of pulselessness. The reason that doctors don’t wait longer is because after ten minutes of pulselessness most organs would no longer be viable for transplantation. So, because doctors are moving more quickly, patients are waking up during the removal of their organs.
One of the cases described in the New York Times article was that of DCD donor Misty Hawkins. After a choking accident, Hawkins suffered a brain injury and was comatose on a ventilator. She was not brain dead, but doctors told her parents that she would never wake up. Her mother did not want Misty to suffer, and hoping that something good could come out of their tragedy, she consented to making her daughter a DCD organ donor.
Misty was taken to the operating room, where a doctor disconnected her ventilator and gave her drugs for comfort. Her heart stopped beating 103 minutes later. After a five-minute waiting period, surgery began. But when surgeons sawed through her breastbone, they discovered that Misty’s heart was beating and that she had resumed breathing. The organ retrieval was called off, and 12 minutes later Misty was declared dead a second time.
It is unclear whether she received any anesthesia. To make matters worse, her parents were never told what happened: an organ procurement coordinator phoned Misty’s mother and said that unfortunately Misty had been unable to become an organ donor. It was not until the family was contacted by the New York Times for comment over a year later that they learned the rest of the story.


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https://www.infowars.com/posts/hospitals-are-using-circulatory-death-to-harvest-organs-of-living-people