{"id":684,"date":"2013-12-29T22:41:00","date_gmt":"2013-12-29T22:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2013\/12\/thinking-through-death-brain-death-and-euthanasia.html"},"modified":"2013-12-29T22:41:00","modified_gmt":"2013-12-29T22:41:00","slug":"thinking-through-death-brain-death-and-euthanasia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2013\/12\/thinking-through-death-brain-death-and-euthanasia.html","title":{"rendered":"Thinking through death, brain death, and euthanasia"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

In which I try to make sense of a couple items in the news:<\/p>\n

First, the tonsillectomy brain-death girl.\u00a0 You probably know the story:\u00a0 the girl went in for routine surgery, and due to complications suffered cardiac arrest and was declared brain dead.\u00a0 The parents objected to the hospital\u2019s determination, and a second doctor confirmed the diagnosis.\u00a0 They\u2019re 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.\u00a0 See here<\/a> for general background and here<\/a> for the latest update, as well as here<\/a> for commentary by Wesley J. Smith.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Is this simply a matter of desperate but ultimately ignorant parents?\u00a0 Maybe.\u00a0 They speak of praying for a miracle, and the reporting doesn\u2019t 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 \u201creal\u201d death, but more somewhere on a continuum from coma to dead-dead.\u00a0 And the fact that there are in fact many instances of PVS \u2013 persistent vegetative state \u2013 patients in the news but not of the brain-dead probably reinforces this.<\/p>\n

On top of this, there are people who are what I suppose you could call \u201cbrain death skeptics,\u201d 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.\u00a0 I read a book called The Undead:\u00a0 Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating-Heart Cadevers \u2014 How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death\u00a0<\/em>by Dick Teresi\u00a0a while back, and pulled it out from the library again.\u00a0 When I read it, I remember thinking, \u201cif this is real, this is pretty awful stuff, but I have no idea how credible this guy is,\u201d and that\u00a0suspicion was confirmed just now by looking at the Amazon reviews:\u00a0 35 one-star, 19\u00a0five-star, and significantly smaller numbers in-between.\u00a0 Many of those\u00a0one-star reviews\u00a0were written by people\u00a0who identify themselves as being a part of the\u00a0transplantation \u201cindustry,\u201d so to speak, and are understandably upset by\u00a0his claims.\u00a0 \u00a0 <\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the trouble: it\u2019s very easy to see that the rise of the \u201cdeath with dignity\u201d movement and the claim that people with degrees of brain impairment far short of brain death are \u201cbetter off dead\u201d can easily fuel suspicion that a doctor with such an opinion isn\u2019t going to respect a firmly pro-life patient\u2019s\/family\u2019s wishes to not withdraw life support unless the patient is truly (and not just legally) dead.<\/p>\n

And, as Wesley J Smith points out in a recent piece in the Weekly Standard<\/a>, it is becoming \u201ccommon sense\u201d to every-growing numbers of people \u2014 in Belgium and the Netherlands, most notably, but elsewhere too, that anyone who wants to die,\u00a0should be able to, and should be given assistance to\u00a0enable themselves to kill themselves as easily as possible, or should be able to engage\u00a0someone else\u2019s services when desired.\u00a0 And, often, doctors or family members make that decision for them.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

And as I found out the other day<\/a>, the Freedom From Religion Foundation even considers \u201cdeath with dignity\u201d to be a great moral advancement on par with the abolition of slavery.<\/p>\n

Am I saying that I believe in Teresi\u2019s conspiracy theory?\u00a0 No, I\u2019m not \u2014 but every time someone in a coma or similar state is described as \u201cpretty much dead\u201d it feeds into a suspicion that brain death is similiarly \u201cnot really dead.\u201d\u00a0 <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In which I try to make sense of a couple items in the news: First, the tonsillectomy brain-death girl.\u00a0 You probably know the story:\u00a0 the girl went in for routine surgery, and due to complications suffered cardiac arrest and was declared brain dead.\u00a0 The parents objected to the hospital\u2019s determination, and a second doctor confirmed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nThinking through death, brain death, and euthanasia<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"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\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, 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