In which I try to make sense of a couple items in the news:
First, the tonsillectomy brain-death girl. You probably know the story: the girl went in for routine surgery, and due to complications suffered cardiac arrest and was declared brain dead. The parents objected to the hospital’s determination, and a second doctor confirmed the diagnosis. They’re now fighting to force the hospital to insert a breathing tube and feeding tube to be able to move her to a nursing home, and finding that nursing home options keep falling through in any case. See here for general background and here for the latest update, as well as here for commentary by Wesley J. Smith.
Is this simply a matter of desperate but ultimately ignorant parents? Maybe. They speak of praying for a miracle, and the reporting doesn’t really indicate whether they recognize the definitiveness of brain death, but hope for as dramatic a miracle as a resurrection from the dead would indeed be, or whether they think that brain death is really not as completely dead as “real” death, but more somewhere on a continuum from coma to dead-dead. And the fact that there are in fact many instances of PVS – persistent vegetative state – patients in the news but not of the brain-dead probably reinforces this.
On top of this, there are people who are what I suppose you could call “brain death skeptics,” people who worry that brain-death is declared too early and sometimes inappropriately, ignoring signs of life and taking shortcuts in diagnostic tests, in order to maximize the number of transplantable organs. I read a book called The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating-Heart Cadevers — How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death by Dick Teresi a while back, and pulled it out from the library again. When I read it, I remember thinking, “if this is real, this is pretty awful stuff, but I have no idea how credible this guy is,” and that suspicion was confirmed just now by looking at the Amazon reviews: 35 one-star, 19 five-star, and significantly smaller numbers in-between. Many of those one-star reviews were written by people who identify themselves as being a part of the transplantation “industry,” so to speak, and are understandably upset by his claims.
But here’s the trouble: it’s very easy to see that the rise of the “death with dignity” movement and the claim that people with degrees of brain impairment far short of brain death are “better off dead” can easily fuel suspicion that a doctor with such an opinion isn’t going to respect a firmly pro-life patient’s/family’s wishes to not withdraw life support unless the patient is truly (and not just legally) dead.
And, as Wesley J Smith points out in a recent piece in the Weekly Standard, it is becoming “common sense” to every-growing numbers of people — in Belgium and the Netherlands, most notably, but elsewhere too, that anyone who wants to die, should be able to, and should be given assistance to enable themselves to kill themselves as easily as possible, or should be able to engage someone else’s services when desired. And, often, doctors or family members make that decision for them.
And as I found out the other day, the Freedom From Religion Foundation even considers “death with dignity” to be a great moral advancement on par with the abolition of slavery.
Am I saying that I believe in Teresi’s conspiracy theory? No, I’m not — but every time someone in a coma or similar state is described as “pretty much dead” it feeds into a suspicion that brain death is similiarly “not really dead.”
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