Brain Death=Medical Fiction

Life Site News Article

LifeSite News Article

Is it morally permissible to harvest the organs of a person in a coma declared “brain dead” by doctors? 

Why and when did organ transplantation first come about?

And what is the Church’s teaching on using organs from a person deemed to be “brain dead”?

Doyen Nguyen, M.D., S.T.L., is a physician specialized in hematopathology and a moral theologian. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in theology at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum) in Rome. Her research is quite extensive and it is featured on https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5102188/

Doyen Nguyen during an in-depth interview with the Italian magazine Radici Cristiane (Link), where she blames a “consumerist culture” for causing many to accept the idea of “brain death,” a term she refers to as an incoherent, “medical fiction.”

Nguyen refutes the invention of the term “brain death” to describe someone in an “irreversible coma” by arguing that the term “irreversible coma” itself “indicates that the patient is alive, for the simple reason that only a living person can become comatose or remain comatose. In other words, it would be an oxymoron to say that a corpse is in coma!”

When a doctor declares a comatose patient to be dead, that patient does not thereby become dead, she said. 

Well worth the time to read the entire article on LifeSite News.

Surprising Realty of Brain Death

This is a short video that speaks of one families hospital reality which is similar to what we experienced with my son, Jamie. Different outcome, their mom survived, but wow it is as if it is a movie script, that these OPO’s (Organ Procurement Organizations) are taught.

A couple of other things stood out to me in the article:

1. The opening statement in the Harvard report which states: “Our primary purpose is to define irreversible coma as a new criterion for death.” Note however, the term “irreversible coma” itself indicates that the patient is alive, for the simple reason that only a living person can become comatose or remain comatose. In other words, it would be an oxymoron to say that a corpse is in coma!
2. A nurse’s comment: What much of the public does not understand is that when they go into “harvest” those organs from a loved one, it will not be done after the person has physically died, (respirations and heart rate have both ceased, etc) or at a time when that person would no longer be capable of physically feeling that pain, but will be done when their body is still physically very much alive and they still will have the capacity to feel painful stimuli. The surgeons want “viable organs” and that means taking them when the host is still physically alive and tissue death has not yet set in or begun to happen. The thought of a loved one lying on that operating table, not able to speak, but very much feeling terrible pain as they are being dissected or cut into and their organs removed for harvesting is too terrible to even contemplate and I do not think that I would ever consent to such a thing for a loved one.

“Brain Death” is under scrutiny as more and more doctors understand that the public is becoming aware of the ethical, legal and medical controversies surrounding “brain death” and questions are being asked.

I haven’t given up on exposing the horrible diagnosis of “brain death” or my son’s story of what we went through.