Abortion and euthanasia are morally unacceptable killings of human persons. Many people are unaware of the fact that organ transplants “after brain death” also kill an individual.
Decades-long propaganda have convinced many people that agreeing to donate their organs after “brain death” is an act of mercy or even an obligation of fraternal charity.
In a series of articles, I would like to offer a scientific and a Christian perspective on organ donation. In this first article, I am going to use a common sense-approach and talk about the history of the so-called “brain death” criterion.
A common sense-approach
Before we start to delve into scientific questions, we need to use our common sense first. God gave us the gift of reason and expects us to use it. What do people try to accomplish with organ donation? They want to get living organs from dead people. In case of a heart transplant, a living, beating heart is taken out from the donor. The removal of the heart obviously kills the individual.
People who are “brain dead” have a beating heart, and can be on a respirator. As someone said, “You can’t put a corpse on a respirator, only inflate the lungs.” “Brain dead” pregnant women can carry a baby to term, see for example the famous case of the “Baby of Erlangen”.
History of “brain death”
Everything hinges on this one term. If “brain death” is not a reliable criterion for determining death, then the entire organ transplant industry falls.
This term goes back to a document published by the Harvard Medical School in 1968, titled “A Definition of Irreversible Coma”. In this document, the authors admit that their reason for introducing this new definition is to make organ transplants possible: “Obsolete criteria for the definition of death can lead to controversy in obtaining organs for transplantation.”
The authors name four criteria for “irreversible coma”, or as they also call it, “irreversible brain damage”: “Unreceptivity and Unresponsitivity” (“a total unawareness to externally applied stimuli”), “No Movements or Breathing” (turning off the respirator for three minutes and see if the patient breaths), “No reflexes” and “Flat Electronencephalogram”.
This new definition of death became necessary, because under previous definitions of death, the patient was alive. The authors of the Harvard document indirectly admit this. They themselves quote Black’s Law Dictionary 4th edition (p. 488): “DEATH. The cessation of life; the ceasing to exist; defined by physicians as a total stoppage of the circulation of the blood, and a cessation of the animal and vital functions consequent thereon, such as respiration, pulsation, etc.”
“Brain death”, or in this case, death by neurological criteria, became gradually accepted in the 1970s in many countries around the world. It gained further support after the release of a document called “Defining Death: A Report on the Medical, Legal and Ethical Issues in the Determination of Death” by an ethics advisory group to the US government in 1981. In the same year and in the years following, the “Uniform Determination of Death Act” (UDDA) was enacted by most states in the United States, making brain death the official criterion for death.
Murder cases against doctors in the 1960s and 70s
What many people don’t know, however, is that there have been murder investigations against transplantation doctors in the 1960s, 70s and even the 80s. For example, Dr. Norman Shumway, the doctor behind the first heart transplant in the United States, was involved in a murder trial, where a murderer tried to argue that the removal of the heart killed the victim and not the gunshot wound. Even though these judicial arguments were not made out of concern for the patient, they still show that there was legal debate about what exactly death is. As Dr. Shumway said: “For the first 5 years [1967-1973], we were technically in violation of state laws as far as donor utilization was concerned”, since he started organ transplants in California before California recognized brain death.
Japan took a different path than many other developed countries. When in 1968, Dr. Wada Juro transplanted a heart in Sapporo, there was a large public outcry. There was large public pressure, since the majority of the Japanese public thought, in accordance with traditional beliefs, that someone is dead if his heart stops beating. (Japanese traditionally associated the soul with the heart, the character for heart “心 – kokoro” having a secondary meaning of soul). In the next three decades, there have been no heart transplants in Japan. Dr. Wada was indicted for murder, but was later acquitted.
In 1984, Dr. Iwasaki Yoji and two other doctors from Tsukuba University performed a multiple transplant of kidneys, pancreas and cornea from a “brain dead” woman. The “Patients’ Rights Conference” of the Tokyo University Hospital filed charges of murder. “Honda Katsunori, a representative of the Patients’ Rights group, related the following problems in the case: ‘(1) the possibility that necessary treatment for the basic disease of the donor was abandoned; (2) transplant from a brain-dead patient before the establishment of the criteria of brain death; (3) discrimination against the psycho-handicapped whose medical legal competence was questionable, and the validity of the consent obtained from the guardian; (4) the adequacy of the selection of the recipient, who could have survived longer if treated conventionally, with insulin and haemodialysis, for example’”. (link) The same group again took legal action in 1988 and 1989, when in Niigata Prefecture, kidney transplants from “brain dead” patients were made.
Organ transplants from “brain dead” people were banned in Japan up until 1997.