Organ donation from a Christian perspective – Part 2

Deutsch Magyar

In this second part of the article series, I am going to describe some cases in the past where “brain dead” people have recovered.

Even if no brain dead people ever recovered, it is still not an argument that one could take out their organs. There is a difference between “dead” and “irreversibly dying”. However, there are repeatedly cases in the media where someone was pronounced “brain dead” but “came back to life”. The following cases have been reported on the pro-life Catholic portal LifeSiteNews.com.

In 2021, Anthony Thomas Hoover II, a man who was pronounced “brain dead”, opened his eyes, looked around and moved as he was wheeled into the operating room for organ removal. The staff claimed at first that his behavior has been nothing but reflexes. The doctors refused to perform the organ transplant. Whistleblowers said that the “Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates” searched for other doctors to remove his organs when he was undeniably alive. Hoover recovered.

In 1985, Jenny Hamann slipped into a coma after taking the wrong medication for her epilepsy. She heard the doctors saying that she is “brain dead” and arguing with her husband, because he didn’t want to allow organ donation. She later woke up and made a complete recovery.

In 2018, the 13-year-old boy Trenton McKinley suffered a serious accident which fractured his skull multiple times. The doctors declared him brain dead and persuaded the parents to agree to organ donation. During the last test whether he has brain activity, they registered brainwaves. The organ donation was canceled and the boy made a slow but steady recovery. In a cruel irony, if the parents wouldn’t have agreed to the organ donation, they would have taken the boy of life support sooner and he would have died.

In 2008, a 45-year-old Frenchman collapsed on the street in Paris, suffering a heart attack. Doctors unsuccessfully tried for one and a half hours to resuscitate him with heart massage. After that, they proceeded to take out his organs, but before they could do that, they noticed that the patient started breathing and reacted to pain stimuli, so the operation was called off. Apparently, the patient made full recovery.

In 2015, 20-year-old Hanna Lottritz collapsed at a party after binge-drinking whiskey. She was delivered to the hospital, where she was in a coma for a day and since she wasn’t breathing, she was put on a respirator. The doctors thought that she was “brain dead”, because she was “completely unresponsive”. After a day, she woke up, but couldn’t communicate due to the tube in her throat. They only took her off the respirator after she demonstrated to be able to breathe, hours later. She made a full recovery.

As a sidenote, even the more secure “cardiac death” criterion is not foolproof. A horrifying case for example, happened in 2021. A 39-year old woman with Down syndrome was removed from life support, and declared “cardiac dead”. There has been no pulse for two minutes before she was declared “dead”. They moved her to an operating table to begin the organ removal. When they were about to remove her kidneys, suddenly, her heart began beating and they gave a her a fatal dose of Fentanyl. The death was ruled a homicide.