Posted on 06/16/2006 4:50:48 PM PDT by wagglebee
NEWARK, June 16, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In some jurisdictions the effort to produce more organs for transplant patients is being aided by plans to “streamline” the medical criteria for “brain death” so that organs can be harvested from patients who are still breathing and have a heartbeat.
The New Jersey State Board of Medical Examiners wants to change the rules to allow just one physician to declare brain death. In addition, the rule that currently requires at least one of the two required physicians declaring “brain death” to be a neurologist or neurosurgeon would also be eliminated. The New Jersey Star Ledger reports that under the proposed rules any doctor given the privileges by a hospital could declare a patient brain dead.
Steven Drake from the disability advocacy organization, Not Dead Yet, told LifeSiteNews.com the New Jersey proposal could go through and if so would likely present a threat to patients.
“Any time you loosen the criteria it means that you’re going to have more misdiagnosis. It’s just a matter of numbers. If you reduce the number and qualifications for the physicians people are going to be misdiagnosed.”
Drake, who himself suffered a brain injury at birth and whose attending physician told his relatives he would be ‘better off dead’, pointed out that doctors will suffer no consequences when botching a brain death determination. “Conveniently, the patient will be dead; there will be no way to confirm it.”
The people driving the ethics community further in its current utilitarian direction, Drake said, “would rather have more organs available for ‘worthy’ people than ‘waste resources’ on people with severe brain injury that many professionals equate privately with those they've labelled ‘brain-dead.’”
The real problem, some medical ethicists have said, is not that brain death might be misdiagnosed, but that it is not a genuine medical diagnosis in the first place. There is growing fear that human beings are starting to be seen in medical and bioethics circles merely as potential donors of organs.
Attendees at a Vatican conference were warned of the growing eagerness to redefine death in order to facilitate organ transplants from “useless” brain injury patients into more promising recipients. Dr. Paul Byrne, former president of the Catholic Medical Association in the US declared, “Brain death is not death.”
Drake told LifeSiteNews.com that confirmation of Byrne’s assertion came in his hearing from a very unexpected corner.
Drake was invited to debate prominent bioethicist Peter Singer at a private school in Chicago in 2004. In his speech, Singer said that the brain death criteria did not exist in medical literature until its invention by a group of bioethicists who used it to “sell brain death” to the public.
Singer said that in the last 30 years nations have all amended the definition of death to include brain death, not because of any medical breakthrough or scientific discovery, but as a result of changes in ethics policies and advances in transplant medicine.
Singer is the world’s foremost advocate of euthanasia and infanticide and his views are immensely influential in the bioethics world. His appointment as De Camp Professor of Bioethics, University Center for Human Values, Princeton University in 1999 is still causing controversy.
Singer pointed to the obvious benefits to hospitals of the invention of “brain death” to free up beds. But more chillingly, it is the advantage for transplant patients from "brain death" that Singer points to as an improvement.
Singer said, the result of this “ethical choice” is that a person on a ventilator who would have been considered alive 30 years ago, "is now considered a good candidate for having his chest cut open to take out a beating heart to give to a total stranger."
Drake said the point is clear. “We all treat ‘brain death’ as something real, but until the bioethicists came up with it, it didn’t exist.”
The Medical Society of New Jersey is reviewing the proposal and the public can comment until July 14.
Contact the Medical Society of New Jersey:
Two Princess Road
Lawrenceville
New Jersey, USA
08648
phone: 609-896-1766
fax: 609-896-1368
Potentially not cool. If your hostile ex-wife is your only available next of kin, and has to decide if the plug should be pulled, do you want her to have an extra reason to off you?
I have not checked off to be an organ donor. I do not want to be in a hospital just when some vip needs my heart
It's just business right?
Sadly, Singer is not using hyperbole in this description. Organs are taken from bodies with still beating hearts. Many/most organs are useless if the body actually dies and the heart stops beating before it is cut open.
I spent a horrifying but enlightening train ride with a transplant nurse once between Ann Arbor and Chicago.
I will never sign an organ donor card. I told my kids dont' bother signing one, because I will never give my approval for them to donate or receive organs.
Harsh, yes, but I truly think it is cannablistic that we 'harvest' from live people.
Pinz
Disgusting but not surprising. Does anyone remember the book 'Coma' by Dr.Robin Cooke? It is about this type of thing. Very frightening 20 years ago. At that time nobody thought the idea would come to fruition.
I hear she's reengaged to Dan Rather....you know....fake but authentic.
Would Dan have ever imagined that he's a natural for Tammy Faye?!
You forgot GOP's former NJ governor Chrissie Todd Dimwitt.
And we must not forget the absolute dumbest politician in American History: Walter F. Mondale.
I nominate him for Total Braindead.
(Anybody got a link to the Saturday Night Live clip on dear Walter?)
New Jersey is an interesting place. You can't get your eggs over easy (cause they're not fully cooked) without a court order, BUT....you can cut a man's heart out of his chest before he's fully dead.
The "Over Easy Corpse Special."
If we go on the lack of intelligence as being a sign of brain dead then we'd loose about two thirds of congress as well with a very few senators qualifying as living with brain function. Hollywood would be a ghost town. Seriously were on the very fast track now of the slippery slope. Anyone have a gif of the a Fiddler?
These things can be clearly spelled out in a will. No reason to have a hostile ex-wife involved.
New Jersey appears to be in the lead for states gaining the right to harvest organs from living conservatives to benefit liberals.
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Between social diseases and heavy drinking, Murtha may be the only one on that list with usable organs...
Registering as a DemocRAT counts as brain dead.
LOL!
Hadn't thought of that.
In a real-world situation, the will only matters if it is seen. If you were just in an accident, can be considered brain-dead, have the organ-donor box checked on your driver's license, and your available next of kin says "go ahead", then that might be it
I stand by my original assertion that (for some disfunctional families) having a cash incentive might not be good for the prospective organ donor
I often say to my wife, "Well, somebody has to think of these things!" She usually responds, "Yes, but why does it have to be you?"
This is just going to make more people refuse to be organ donors. If I lived in New Jersey my living will would say absolutely no organ donation. It seems to be the only way to protect yourself.
>> Ann Coulter should avoid having any medical procedures performed in New Jersey. <<
I'm not dead yet! In fact, I'm feeling quite better; I think I'll go for a walk. (Or a hamburger, maybe, Ann? It'd help a whole lot!)
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