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>> They're the kind who will say it's evil to keep a body alive when the soul is gone. If you ask them about the religious or philospohical basis of this, they naturally won't answer. But they will sidestep, of course, and change "when the soul is gone" to "when the brain is dead".

An excellent recounting of the thinking at Harvard so-called University in the late 1960s when they got into the body snatching business. Namely, they wanted body parts for transplants. (They should endow a chair in the name of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mother of Frankenstein.)

Trouble is, when people die, they spoil. You can't use rotten body parts for transplanting.

So at Harvard, they formed a committee and thought and thought and thought until someone exclaimed, "Say, here's an idea!!" If patients are unconscious, tell everyone they are dead ("brain dead"). Then you can carve them up before they get stinky. Then you can sell all the parts. Be sure to say that they were being kept alive artificially and there was no hope for recovery (which is certainly true as soon as we carve them up).

Much of the medical profession has adopted the Harvard Conditions for brain death (notice that being dead isn't one of the conditions), after which the body-snatching surgical team rushes to its task and snips out the saleable parts.

I understand that there is plenty of discussion as to whether Terri was truly PVS or not, and the possiblity exists that there will be discussions around this same concept for Haleigh, too. However, I think it's about time that everyone realizes that Terri was not brain-dead, nor was she ever brain-dead, because if she had been they would not have been able to resuscitate her in 1990 no matter how hard they tried. Some people seem to continually want to put out utter untruths about Terri as being clinically dead. She was not clinically dead until March 31, 2005.

From your link, T'wit:

Harvard Ad Hoc Committee on Brain Death In 1968, this committee of the Harvard Medical School published a report describing the following characteristics of a permanently nonfunctioning brain, a condition it referred to as "irreversible coma," now known as brain death:

1. Unreceptivity and unresponsitivity

2. --patient shows total unawareness to external stimuli and unresponsiveness to painful stimuli; No movements or breathing

3. --all spontaneous muscular movement, spontaneous respiration and response to stimuli are absent; No reflexes

--fixed, dilated pupils; lack of eye movement even when hit or turned, or ice water is placed in the ear; lack of response to noxious stimuli; unelicitable tendon reflexes.

In addition to these criteria, a flat electroencephalogram (EEG) was recommended. The committee also noted that drug intoxication and hypothermia which can both cause reversible loss of brain functions should be excluded as causes. The report was used in determining patient care issues and organ transplants. The condition of irreversible coma, i.e., brain death, needs to be distinguished from the persistent vegetative state, in which clinical presentations are similar but in which patients manifest cycles of sleep and wakefulness. [See President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research, Defining Death (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1981)].

Gee, I'm posting to you a lot tonight! :) Anyway, I'll do it again.

"So at Harvard, they formed a committee and thought and thought and thought until someone exclaimed, "Say, here's an idea!!" If patients are unconscious, tell everyone they are dead ("brain dead"). Then you can carve them up before they get stinky. Then you can sell all the parts. Be sure to say that they were being kept alive artificially and there was no hope for recovery (which is certainly true as soon as we carve them up)."

We're seeing the result of viewing people as just *things*, rather than as people. I was going to say they lost sight of the fact that people aren't just things. But really, they intentionally closed their eyes to the fact. So now people are treated as nothing more than potential moneymaking resources to be carved up and sold off. No different than a seam of coal or a felled tree.