Boston, Mass., Aug 17, 2008 / 23:00 pm
An article in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), questioning the criteria of “brain death” and “cardiac death” especially in relation to organ donation, could affect the validity of ethical arguments approving the practice of organ donation at a person’s apparent death.
The NEJM article’s authors, Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Robert D. Truog and National Institutes of Health bioethics department faculty member Dr. Franklin G. Miller, argue that “as an ethical requirement for organ donation, the dead donor rule has required unnecessary and unsupportable revisions of the definition of death,” LifeSiteNews.com reports.
Saying that the scientific literature does not support the criteria which consider “brain death” and “cardiac death” to be actual death, the authors argue that the donation of vital organs taken from living human beings should not be considered unethical.
“The uncomfortable conclusion to be drawn from this literature is that although it may be perfectly ethical to remove vital organs for transplantation from patients who satisfy the diagnostic criteria of brain death, the reason it is ethical cannot be that we are convinced they are really dead,” they write.