Legally-dead? Or “dead-dead”?

So I wrote about this before, but the Jahi McMath saga continues, with the parents trying to find some location to take the child, and the hospital insisting that they won’t insert a feeding tube because it’s wrong to operate on a dead body. The latest update is that the hospital and family have entered mediation to extend the court-ordered ventilator, while the family tries to line up a doctor to insert a feeding tube.

I am not a neurologist nor even a well-read laypeson, but the hospital’s behavior is callous, to say the least. They claim it’s unethical to operate on a corpse — but yet, it’s done all the time: it’s just called medical research. Isn’t that, after all, how medical students first learn? It’s also inappropriate to say that her care takes needed resources away from other patients — I find it unlikely that any individual patient is unable to receive treatment because there is no doctor, ventilator, or hospital room available. And a brain-dead individual hardly needs an ICU room, any more than a PVS patient would.

Their persistent use of the word “corpse” is also a bit suspect, given that that word, in plain English, refers to a decaying body. And it’s clear that they have a conflict of interest, if they believe that ultimately the girl’s costs could be laid at their feet due to a malpractice suit, and maintaining her would ultimately result in higher costs than just a simple wrongful-death suit.

I’ve also read repeatedly that her body is decaying just as any other corpse would — but I’ve only read this in blog comments, not from experts. And take a look at this report from 2012, about a brain-dead pregnant woman maintained by life support for a full month to allow her twins to develop enough to be delivered and survive.

Here’s a striking comment: the doctor in the case “said an important ethical issue in cases like these is whether a brain-dead woman would suffer by being kept on a respirator and undergoing a C-section.” Suffer? How can a corpse suffer?

This makes the situation feel all the murkier. Is a declaration of death in brain-death cases really just a legal concept, like legally-blind (when the individual may or may not have some remaining vision), to enable us to avoid dismembering living people for their organs, and to make the decision-process easier for a family faced with “pulling the plug”?

(Here’s another even longer case: 3 months.)

After all, what would happen if we rename “brain death” as “irreverible and complete cessation of brain function” but death was defined the way it always had been, as that state after which the only thing left is for the body to decay?

That being said, of course, at this point so many specialists have examined the McMath girl and enough time has elapsed that the parents really ought to recognize that the time to hope for a miracle is nearly over, or, rather, has arrived, as they certainly can pray that the girl will breathe on her own at the time that the ventilator is shut off.