Topics Brain death

Have you been informed...?

• The total loss of brain function – brain death – cannot be diagnosed.
   
• Brain death is a definition which allows the removal of organs from a dying patient legally.
   
• Brain dead patients must be nourished, cared for, checked, tested and treated with medication.
   
• If necessary they are even resuscitated.
   
• They are warm, and their metabolism works.
   
• Brain dead women can give birth to a child, and brain dead men can have erections.
   
• Brain dead patients can react to stimuli; movements of arms and legs are possible.

"As dead as necessary, as alive as possible"
states Professor Franco Rest

Articles:

Here are some articles about organ donation and brain death. There will be more material on this topic later. If you know some more material for our website, please get in contact with us.

• Minority Report: Two secular positions opposing donation
  Dignity in Donation, 27th April 2012
  Published on our site by courtesy of Dr David Evans and Dr David Hill
   
• The living and the dead - Transplantation medicine is beginning to take its leave from the "dead-donor rule"
  Linus S. Geisler
  The "dead-donor rule", which has been accepted by transplantation medicine for some 40 years, requires that vital organs be taken only from dead patients; living patients must not be killed by organ removal. Novel concepts of death – such as "brain death" and "cardiac death" – having failed to satisfy the demand on this basis, there are now moves to justify the removal of organs for transplantation from the undeniably living. Linus S. Geisler warns against breaking a fundamental taboo.
   
• "Brain Death" is Not Death!
  Essay - At a meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in early February 2005
  By: Paul A. Byrne, Cicero G. Coimbra, Robert Spaemann and Mercedes Arzú Wilson
   
• Controversies in the Determination of Death: A White Paper by the President's Council on Bioethics
  The President's Council on Bioethics
  Washington, D.C., December 2008
   
• The Nasty Side of Organ Transplanting
  By Norm Barber, Australia, Third Edition 2007
  Online-Book, 146 pages with background informations about brain death and organ donation.
   
• Brain death - The new death while the body is alive
  Flyer by KAO - Critical Information about Organ Transplantation
   

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