CV NEWS FEED // A Catholic ethicist is sounding the alarm on the inadequate “brain death” criteria used by the organ harvesting industry, stating that the standards allow for vulnerable people to be exploited and human dignity to be trampled upon.
Charles Camosy is a professor of medical humanities at the Creighton University School of Medicine and the author of “Peter Singer and Christian Ethics: Beyond Polarization.”
Camosy wrote an April 29 op-ed in the Religion News Service titled: “Can secular health care institutions be trusted to make a moral brain death policy?”
The article’s opening highlights: “A lack of consensus on the definition of ‘brain death’ has led to a default policy that declares living people dead.”
The highly-debated concept of “brain death” was introduced in 1968, which allowed doctors to declare a person dead if the person’s brain no longer functioned. In December 2023, the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) changed this definition, rejecting “whole brain death” as a requirement, Camosy wrote, “[and] replacing it with concern for functioning of the ‘brain as a whole.’”
“Specifically, AAN claims the whole brain does not need to be dead; instead, some neuroendocrine function (such as in the hypothalamus) can persist and a human being still be declared dead,” he continued:
This was the definition that led Jahi McMath to be declared dead by her home state of California — before she later reached puberty and had her first period! Another Black victim of U.S. end-of-life practices, she would go on to live for five years in an apartment in New Jersey, the only state in the union that takes religious freedom (and therefore the wishes of McMath’s parents) into account on these matters.
Camosy criticized this definition of death as “obviously incompatible with both common sense and with the explicit views of multiple religious traditions.”
The National Catholic Bioethics Center rejected this definition as “incompatible with the church’s teaching,” he wrote, “and it was New Jersey’s Orthodox Jews who pushed to carve out the religious freedom exemption in their state that allowed McMath to be cared for and not discarded as California intended.”
Camosy also highlighted that when physicians use “quality of life” as their framework for complex healthcare decisions, disabled or brain-damaged persons face greater risks of discrimination.
The numerous legal, moral, scientific, and ethical issues surrounding the “brain death” definition debate–of which no real consensus has been reached, Camosy added – warrant a call for states to reject AAN’s current standards.
“Any state that naively adopts the AAN standard, especially via a nonlegislative process, should face legal challenges, not only because it may violate local statutes,” he wrote:
Human beings with catastrophic brain injuries have precisely the same dignity as able-bodied human beings, and describing them as “dead” so they may be used for their organs is deeply offensive.
Doing so may also be illegal under both the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the religious freedom provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
He wrote that AAN’s standard puts brain-injured patients at risk of having their organs harvested while they are still alive–a fact recently backed by over 150 Catholic bioethicists, scholars, doctors, and religious and civic leaders in a major statement rejecting AAN’s standards.
“Motivated by the wish for organ donation, secular medicine is engaged in a culture war against human dignity and equality, in which it is finding new ways to discard patients who are disproportionately economically vulnerable and from historically marginalized communities. It is time to stand up and be heard and hold the medical communities to account in defense of the least among us,” Camosy concluded.
To read Camosy’s full article on the current brain death debate, click here.
