Summaries / Resúmenes - Studia Moralia

IS THE BRAIN-DEAD PATIENT REALLY DEAD? 289Despite the apparent universal acceptance of the neurologicalcriteria for death, however, BD – from now on, all referencesto BD patients will presume the TBD criteria – has remainedcontroversial even where it has become the legal standard.Significantly, thirty-five years after the publication of theHarvard criteria, the public at large still does not really believethat BD individuals are really and truly dead. In 1994, a MiamiHerald story was headlined “Brain-Dead Woman Kept Alive inHopes She’ll Bear Child.” After the same woman did bear herchild, the San Francisco Chronicle reported: “Brain-DeadWoman Gives Birth, then Dies.” 39 Newspaper reporters are notthe only ones who deny that the brain dead are really dead. In astudy of doctors and nurses who work with BD patients at hospitalsin Cleveland, OH, one in three of them thought that peoplewhose brains had died could be classified as dead becausethey were “irreversibly dying” or because they had an “unacceptablequality of life.” 40 In India, 17.3% of the medical staffsurveyed believed that BD is reversible. 41 Peter Singer suggeststhat the common-place and persistent refusal of both the ordinarylayman and the medical professional to equate brain deathand death is probably because “people have enough commonsense to see that the brain dead are not really dead. […] Thebrain death criterion of death is nothing other than a convenientfiction. It was proposed and accepted because it makes it possiblefor us to salvage organs that would otherwise be wasted, andto withdraw medical treatment when it is doing no good.” 42Though this proposal is certainly a controversial one, it is strikingto me that no hospital or medical school has ever proposedthat medical students perform pathology dissections on BD individualsor that experimental drugs be used on BD patients to test39Cited by Peter SINGER in “Is the Sanctity of Life Ethic,” p. 295.40Stuart YOUNGNER et al., “’Brain Death’ and Organ Retrieval: A CrosssectionalSurvey of Knowledge and Concepts Among Health Professionals,”JAMA 261 (1990): 2205-2210.41P. SINGH et al., “Level of awareness about transplantation, brain deathand cadaveric organ donation in hospital staff in India,” Prog Transplant 12(2002):289-92.42SINGER, “Is the Sanctity of Life Ethic,” p. 295.