[MarMema]

The two authors of this proposal are pediatric specialists with offices in or near the pedi ICU at Boston Childrens. One is a pedi anesthesiologist, and the other a pedi pulmonologist.

They are proposing that brain damaged and ill children in the ICU be used for organ harvesting without dying first.
What they must mean is the killing of children who are seriously ill in order to harvest their organs successfully, because the children are likely to die soon anyway.

[hocndoc]

I understand who the authors are and see the logical fallicy in the following two sentences:

""The concept of brain death was developed, in part, to allow patients with devastating neurologic injury to be declared dead before the occurrence of cardiopulmonary arrest. Brain death is essential to current practices of organ retrieval because it legitimates organ removal from bodies that continue to have circulation and respiration, thereby avoiding ischemic injury to the organs."

Although at this late hour I can't remember the formal name for this error, the fact that brain cells die before the heart cells and that we transplant hearts from brain-dead donors does not mean that the justification for the ethical and legal history of the concept of "brain death" is organ transplantation.