From lifesitenews.com and written by Heidi Klessig, M.D. Tue Nov 25, 2025 - 3:15 pm EST: Organ donation industry's redefinitions of death threaten living people - LifeSite
Read and heed!!!
"(LifeSiteNews) — Another congressional committee is investigating more whistleblowers’ complaints regarding the organ transplantation industry. United States House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman David Schweikert are seeking answers from Carolyn Welsh, president and CEO of the New Jersey Organ and Tissue Sharing Network (NJTO), regarding multiple allegations of legal and ethical violations on her watch.
The complaints include the horrific case of a “circulatory death” organ donor who reanimated prior to organ retrieval. Despite the fact that the patient had regained signs of life, NJTO executives actually directed frontline staff to continue the organ recovery process. (Thankfully, hospital personnel at Virtua Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, New Jersey, refused this request.) NJTO is also accused of pressuring the families of potential donors by falsely implying the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles had registered a consent to donate when that was not known to be the case. NJTO apparently also continued to insist that people were registered donors even after they had removed their consent to donate from their driver’s licenses. The official complaint further states that NJTO allegedly tried to delete evidence pertaining to the committee’s investigation.
Since 1968, when 13 men at Harvard Medical School redefined “desperately injured” people as being dead enough to become organ donors, organ procurement has continued to push the boundaries of life and death in a never-ending quest for more organs. When the first and only multicenter prospective study of brain death discovered in 1972 that a brain death diagnosis did not invariably correlate with a diffusely destroyed brain, principal investigator Dr. Gaetano Molinari pointed out that “brain death” was a prognosis of death, and not death itself. Dr. Molinari wrote:
[D]oes a fatal prognosis permit the physician to pronounce death? It is highly doubtful whether such glib euphemisms as ‘he’s practically dead,’… ‘he can’t survive,’ … ‘he has no chance of recovery anyway,’ will ever be acceptable legally or morally as a pronouncement that death has occurred.
But despite Dr. Molinari’s doubts, history shows this is exactly what has been accepted, and the rising numbers of people who have been taken for organ harvesting while still alive bears this out. Even though “brain dead” TJ Hoover III was still looking around and visibly crying such that two doctors refused to remove his organs, Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates ordered their staff to find another doctor to perform the procedure. “Circulatory death” donor Misty Hawkins was found to have a beating heart when her breastbone was sawed open for organ procurement. And Larry Black Jr. was rescued from the operating room table just minutes before having his organs removed, and went on to make a full recovery.
Given that we have been stretching the definitions of death for nearly 60 years, is it any wonder that organ procurement personnel appear to be thinking “he’s practically dead,” “he can’t survive,” “he has no chance of recovery anyway” as they push still-living people towards the operating room?
But it’s not just organ procurement teams that are pushing these new definitions of death. Just three weeks after failing in their attempts to broaden the legal definitions of death by revising the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA), the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) published a new brain death guideline that explicitly allows brain death to be declared in the presence of ongoing brain function. Since this obviously does not comply with the UDDA, which requires “the irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain including the brain stem,” the AAN has been trying to get around the law by contacting state health departments, medical boards, medical societies, and hospital associations requesting that they acknowledge the AAN’s brain death guideline as the “accepted medical standards” for declaring neurological death.
The AAN has also just published a position statement of additional guidance on brain death discussing how to handle objections to the brain death diagnosis. Even though the AAN’s brain death guideline does not comply with U.S. law and has been proven to be unable to predict whether or not a brain injury is irreversible, the AAN still wants to make the use of their guideline mandatory. If a family’s objection to a brain death diagnosis cannot be overcome, the AAN says that life support may be unilaterally withdrawn – over the family’s objections. The AAN also says that clinicians are professionally obligated to make a brain death determination, and that they should be credentialed to do so according to the standards of the AAN guideline. Laughably, the AAN recommends the Neurocritical Care Society’s brain death determination course, which consists of a one-hour video, followed by unlimited attempts to correctly answer 25 questions, following which a certificate of completion can be had for as little as six dollars.
The Dead Donor Rule is an ethical maxim stating that people must neither be alive when organs are removed nor killed by the process of organ removal. Redefining neurologically injured people as being “brain dead” and redefining people who could still be resuscitated as being dead according to “circulatory death” standards have for too long allowed organ procurement teams to meet the letter of the Dead Donor Rule through sleight of hand. Playing fast and loose with the definitions of death for the sake of organ donation must stop. Patients with a poor prognosis must not be considered “dead enough” to become organ donors. People registering as organ donors must be given fully informed consent as to the risks involved.
Even utilitarian philosopher Dr. Peter Singer has called brain death an ethical choice masquerading as a medical fact. Imposing mandates that force patients and doctors to accept these questionable ethical choices is NOT the best way to establish trust."
Heidi Klessig MD is a retired anesthesiologist and pain management specialist who writes and speaks on the ethics of organ donation and transplantation. She is the author of “The Brain Death Fallacy” and her work may be found at respectforhumanlife.com.
End of eye-opening article...
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