I thought the same thing and went to dig up the original. Here it is:
One common illustration is called Transplant. Imagine that each of five patients in a hospital will die without an organ transplant. The patient in Room 1 needs a heart, the patient in Room 2 needs a liver, the patient in Room 3 needs a kidney, and so on. The person in Room 6 is in the hospital for routine tests. Luckily (for them, not for him!), his tissue is compatible with the other five patients, and a specialist is available to transplant his organs into the other five. This operation would save their lives, while killing the “donor”. There is no other way to save any of the other five patients (Foot 1966, Thomson 1976; compare related cases in Carritt 1947 and McCloskey 1965).
This is from the consequentialism page on the SEP, and it goes on to discuss modifications of utilitarianism that avoid biting the bullet (scalpel?) here.
This situation seems different for me for two reason:
Off-topic way: Killing the "donor" is bad for similar reasons as 2-boxing the Newcomb problem is bad. If doctors killed random patients then patients wouldn't go to hospitals and medicine would collapse. IMO the supposedly utilitarian answer to the transplant problem is not really utilitarian.
On-topic way: The surgeons transplant organs to save lives, not to make babies. Saving lives and making lives seem very different to me, but I'm not sure why (or if) they differ from a utilitarian perspective.
Haven't had one of these for awhile. This thread is for questions or comments that you've felt silly about not knowing/understanding. Let's try to exchange info that seems obvious, knowing that due to the illusion of transparency it really isn't so obvious!