Some people won’t donate organs because they are afraid organ transplant doctors might accidently take their organs while they are still alive. That’s just silly. They do take the organs while you are still alive alright, but it is no accident. It is done on purpose. The only way vital organs can be used for transplants is to take them from people whose hearts are still beating.
A May, 2012 article in Discover Magazine called “The Beating Heart Donors,” (by Dick Teresi) states that “They urinate. They have heart attacks and bedsores. They have babies. They may even feel pain. Meet the organ donors who are ‘pretty dead.’” It may be one of the most carefully disguised facts in all of modern medicine. If you have signed an organ donor card and are chosen for vital organ transplantation, you will be alive when the organs are taken (but not for long.)
Perhaps you are comforted by the fact you will be declared dead. Don’t be. Perhaps you think there is some universal and rational standard for defining “brain death.” There isn’t.
A little research finds it simply isn’t true, as I wrote earlier:
Definitions of brain death are deliberately skewed to lean towards a finding of brain death. For example, as described in a Critical Care Nurse Journal, medical personnel are given a checklist to determine whether a person is dead. It is implied that the patient must fail all of the tests or alas, they must be treated as still alive. But, when one moves to the bottom of the checklist, you find this statement under “Other confirmatory tests” (for example, the EEG, cerebral angiography or brain scans) which are “Useful in situations where clinical exam is equivocal or a full examination cannot be performed” In other words, if some of the other tests indicate someone is alive, you keep trying until you get some that confirm your preconceived notion that they are dead.
It is important to note that, for example, “Texas law does not mandate any particular test for the diagnosis of brain death.” Consequently, “although fairly consistent criteria are used to diagnose brain death, variability exists across states and practice settings as a result of local legislation and institutional policy. Individual hospital practice may also vary, depending on available resources and physicians’ experience.” (Emphasis mine!)
In other words, death is whatever “the experts” want it to be (and they don’t have to be all that “experty”). As the Discover article pointed out, it was when doctors became dissatisfied defining death by “a heart that could not be restarted, or lungs that could not breathe” (A Biblical definition, I might add) that they sought a new definition of death based on personhood. The medical community has known all along it was putting forth a fraud. This new definition was arbitrary and capricious from the very beginning.
For the Christian, these tests are irrelevant other than to show how duplicitous some professionals and experts (godless scientists and doctors) can be when we grant them a favored place in determining right and wrong. It isn’t theirs. It is God’s.
