No ‘moral certainty’ that brain death is really death

No ‘moral certainty’ that brain death is really death: prominent Catholic ethics professor Brugger | LifeSiteNews.com: A prominent American professor of Catholic medical ethics has said that in “brain death” criteria there is no “moral certitude” that a patient is really dead, a condition laid out as necessary for removing organs. The available evidence, he said, “raises a reasonable doubt that excludes ‘moral certitude’ that ventilator-sustained brain dead bodies are corpses.”

Professor E. Christian Brugger quoted Pope John Paul II, who told a congress on organ transplants that death is “a single event consisting in the total disintegration of that unity and integrated whole that is the personal self. Although we cannot identify the event directly, we can identify biological signs consequent upon the loss of that unity." But according to many experts, those biological signs are not present in “brain death” cases.