- Feb 5, 2002
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COMMENTARY: The April 11 statement by The National Catholic Bioethics Center affirms that ‘a partial brain death standard can never be acceptable to Catholics.’
Tremendous controversy surrounds the discussions surrounding brain death, which is the notion that when the brain is dead, the person is dead.
In 1997 one of the world’s foremost brain death scholars published “Recovery from ‘Brain Death’: A Neurologist’s Apologia” (republished with updated endnotes in April 2024). In it, pediatric neurologist D. Alan Shewmon, a convert to Catholicism, documents his professional conversion from believing that brain-dead patients are dead to the firm conviction that nearly all of them are alive. (He allows for the possibility that some patients who have died from widespread bodily injury incidentally meet the criteria for brain death.) “There is no question that [this] truth will eventually prevail,” Shewmon wrote. “The only questions are: after how long a time and at what human cost?”
Despite this clarion call 27 years ago to stop harvesting organs from brain-dead patients, organ donation and transplantation practices have remained essentially unchanged.
While some Catholics hold that the person is dead when there is complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity (“whole brain death”), a growing number of Catholics agree with Shewmon that whole brain death cannot be used to diagnose the death of the person. Crucially, though, on a pragmatic level, this difference of opinion is irrelevant because the medical criteria to diagnose brain death establishes only partial loss of brain function (“partial brain death”). All Catholics agree that patients with partial brain death are alive, and the Catholic Church forbids removing vital organs when this act would kill the patient.
Continued below.
www.ncregister.com
Tremendous controversy surrounds the discussions surrounding brain death, which is the notion that when the brain is dead, the person is dead.
In 1997 one of the world’s foremost brain death scholars published “Recovery from ‘Brain Death’: A Neurologist’s Apologia” (republished with updated endnotes in April 2024). In it, pediatric neurologist D. Alan Shewmon, a convert to Catholicism, documents his professional conversion from believing that brain-dead patients are dead to the firm conviction that nearly all of them are alive. (He allows for the possibility that some patients who have died from widespread bodily injury incidentally meet the criteria for brain death.) “There is no question that [this] truth will eventually prevail,” Shewmon wrote. “The only questions are: after how long a time and at what human cost?”
Despite this clarion call 27 years ago to stop harvesting organs from brain-dead patients, organ donation and transplantation practices have remained essentially unchanged.
While some Catholics hold that the person is dead when there is complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity (“whole brain death”), a growing number of Catholics agree with Shewmon that whole brain death cannot be used to diagnose the death of the person. Crucially, though, on a pragmatic level, this difference of opinion is irrelevant because the medical criteria to diagnose brain death establishes only partial loss of brain function (“partial brain death”). All Catholics agree that patients with partial brain death are alive, and the Catholic Church forbids removing vital organs when this act would kill the patient.
Continued below.
Opinion: Catholics Should Not Be ‘Brain Death’ Organ Donors
COMMENTARY: The April 11 statement by The National Catholic Bioethics Center affirms that ‘a partial brain death standard can never be acceptable to Catholics.’
