Organ harvesting from brain-dead patients has been called “elective ventilation.” The term gives Simon Willis pause:
This kind of bureaucratic vocabulary is found in Kazuo Ishiguro’s science-fiction novel “Never Let Me Go”, where children are cloned for the purpose of donating organs to "originals", or non-clones. At one point donation is referred to as "unzipping". The children's duties end when they “complete”, or die. Ishiguro's novel is a powerful example of how issues of life, death and organ donation are obscured by euphemism.
The Dish 