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New Jersey Looking to Harvest More Organs by Easing "Brain Death" Criteria
LifeSiteNews ^ | 6/16/06 | Hilary White

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


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Extended News; Government; US: New Jersey
KEYWORDS: bodybrokers; braindeath; cultureofdeath; eugenics; healthcare; moralabsolutes; organharvesting; terrischiavo; umdnj
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To: wagglebee

Ah yes, Peter SSinger.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F


81 posted on 06/17/2006 12:05:10 AM PDT by Criminal Number 18F (America has no native criminal class, apart from Congress -- Mark Twain)
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To: wagglebee
In his books, Singer has said that children less than one month old have no human consciousness and do not have the same rights as others.

"Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person," he wrote in one book. "Sometimes it is not wrong at all."

82 posted on 06/17/2006 12:11:59 AM PDT by SweetCaroline (.....once there was a way to get back homeward.)
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To: wagglebee

But ain't it better to cut 'em up than to starve 'em?


83 posted on 06/17/2006 12:13:17 AM PDT by HiTech RedNeck
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To: mockingbyrd

Then they'll all the sooner starve you, I suppose


84 posted on 06/17/2006 12:14:05 AM PDT by HiTech RedNeck
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To: wagglebee

"Ideas have consequences," and we are witnessing the unfolding and ongoing consequences (evil) resulting from enlightenment ideas that were collectively systematized into secular humanism (socialism and its variants).
"God is dead"="godless man is the measure of all things." The sub-creator has usurped the Creator's authority.


85 posted on 06/17/2006 2:26:15 AM PDT by Lindykim (Courage is the first of all the virtues...if you haven*t courage, you may not have the opportunity)
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To: wagglebee
Pinged from Terri JUNE Dailies

8mm

86 posted on 06/17/2006 4:34:31 AM PDT by 8mmMauser (Jezu ufam Tobie...Jesus I trust in Thee)
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To: wagglebee

This is the elephant in the room, something more obvious by the day as we open our eyes. Declare some poor young accident victim brain dead, and open up the used parts auction. Parents probably will buy the expert almighty doctor analysis and go along with it thinking they are saving the victim just a little bit by allowing the organs to continue on. Meanwhile the poor victim may have been able to recover, but who would know.

Singer is the present tense of Sanger.


87 posted on 06/17/2006 4:39:40 AM PDT by 8mmMauser (Jezu ufam Tobie...Jesus I trust in Thee)
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To: Das Outsider

Your words are very kind. I'm an insect kicking dust, trying to kick it in the right direction. Story about that later.

Being a realist is the best mercy to others, and the only way to live with truth. Hiding from the truth means sooner or later the truth is going to kick in your door.

Sent a freepmail a few minutes ago.

;-)


88 posted on 06/17/2006 7:28:43 AM PDT by little jeremiah
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To: wagglebee

The momentum is on the side of the death forces...Frist is being pressured to being the fetal stem cell legislation back to a vote this summer...supposedly there are 60 votes to override the president's expected veto.

The forces of evil are pushing this country to the precipice. God help us all.

http://news.monstersandcritics.com/health/article_1164562.php/Analysis_Stem_cell_vote_by_summer


89 posted on 06/17/2006 8:28:52 PM PDT by eleni121 ('Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!' (Julian the Apostate))
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To: wagglebee

I guess New Jersey can use a few more brains- HA!


90 posted on 06/21/2006 7:36:09 PM PDT by Minutemen ("It's a Religion of Peace")
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To: wagglebee

Lets kick this one up, oldschool!

"What's New Jersey's state vegetable?" :-)


91 posted on 06/21/2006 7:37:10 PM PDT by HitmanLV ("5 Minute Penalty for #40, Ann Theresa Calvello!" - RIP 1929-2006)
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To: wagglebee

Awful! I thought this only happened in barbarian places like China.


92 posted on 06/21/2006 7:40:42 PM PDT by Palladin ("Governor Lynn Swann."...it has a nice ring to it!)
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