For fellow citizens willing – and brave enough – to face the facts.
Irreversible Loss of All Brain Function (Brain Death)
as a Reliable Sign of Life
The clinical picture of irreversible, isolated loss of brain function (brain death) can occur and remain observable only in a living human being. The emergence, diagnosis, and persistence of this condition are possible only under intensive-care measures (e.g., mechanical ventilation) that maintain cardiac–circulatory and other organ functions – and are thus bound to a body animated by life down to its cellular physiological processes. In this state, a patient can be maintained alive for days, weeks, or, in some cases, even months.
In that sense, the very existence of this condition proves – at every moment of its existence – the vital state of the body in which it appears and upon which it imprints its signs. It is therefore a reliable sign of life, the persistence of which makes the appearance of signs of death impossible.
Even though, with a documented brain death diagnosis, every final protocol sheet – according to the prescribed form – must and does formally at the same time record that “the death of the patient is established”, the continued presence of this condition, with the bodily state unchanged and intensive-care measures ongoing, demonstrates that the patient’s death has not in fact occurred.
A determination of a person’s death oriented to missing signs of life or present signs of death – like a post-mortem examination – is neither the subject of brain death diagnostics nor possible within that framework at all. Moreover, the label of a formal declaration can never remove the stubbornly contrary reality of a body that, by its vital signs, is unambiguously alive.
On the Intellectual Bankruptcy of the Brain Death Concept
Death has no meaning other than: the end of life.
If phenomena of life are observed, death cannot have occurred at the place where they appear – as the clinical picture of the irreversible, isolated loss of brain function (brain death) itself demonstrates.
Conversely, a corpse is both evidence and result of the absence of life as the organising principle. With the definitive cessation of respiration, the heart–circulatory system, and all remaining organ functions, the metabolic processes characteristic of all life also cease. The whole-body process of dying begins. In its wake appear the certain signs of death: livor mortis, rigor mortis, autolysis, putrefaction, and decomposition.
A subsequent, broader phase of dying – progressing at different rates across cell and tissue types and already accompanied by signs of death – is termed intermediate life and is forensically relevant for determining the time of death.
Only the observable state of a body can inform us whether life or death is present. The death that has occurred can be grasped by an observer’s bodily senses only through bodily manifestations in the corresponding signs of death. Therefore, the death of an organism can never remain ‘hidden externally’, and in the absence of external signs there can never be an ‘internal sign of death’. Nor does any sign of death come alone, and in the death of a human being there can be no isolated loss of brain function.
Death means the end of life – not the irreversible failure of the brain organ within a body that, as a whole and down to its cellular physiological processes, remains in the state of life under intensive-care conditions (ventilation, medication) with the heart–circulatory system and other organ functions maintained.
Therefore, isolated irreversible loss of brain function can never be the death of the human person, no matter how often this flatly nonsensical claim is repeated in service of the ‘brain death concept’. On the contrary, it imprints upon the living bodily order in which it occurs merely its specific symptomatology as a modification of that vital state.
A human being remains a citizen of the earthly world so long as their body is in a living state. However severe bodily functional impairments may be, they can never be more than limiting or disabling conditions for the degree to which a person can make use of the instrument of their body – in whose individual constitution, formation, and life history they are multiply represented. The death of a human being, as the end of embodied human existence, occurs only with their bodily death.
Or can those who, in the case of the clinical picture of irreversible loss of brain function, concoct the ‘death of the person’ go on to cremate or bury that person while the body continues to exist in the state of life?
The brain death conception entered the world with a major push in 1968 and, in substance, without justification. Later attempts at justification failed miserably and have been the target of scathing criticism to this day.
Irreversible, isolated loss of brain function as the occurrence of a clinical condition in a living body and death as the end of life exclude one another.
Therefore, ‘brain death’ as the death of the human person is neither observable – that is, empirically not graspable – nor thinkable. The brain death concept is rationally indefensible and an intellectual bankruptcy of the first order.
On the Moral Bankruptcy of
Presumed-Consent Legislation in Organ Removal
Under the presumed-consent system, every severely ill patient is to become an organ donor even without personal consent in the clinical state of irreversible, isolated loss of brain function (brain death), unless an explicit objection has been recorded or relatives communicate the person’s refusal.
This entails the possibility that complete strangers – possibly even without the knowledge or consent of the affected, officially declared-dead patient – may, by removing that patient’s organs, legally intrude upon the patient’s body, life, and dying, while for that very purpose the body is in reality kept alive by intensive-care measures until the organ removal that ends that state.
People imagine they can remedy an ‘organ shortage’ by simply taking others’ organs ‘after death’ unless they object – in the delusion that this will increase organ ‘donations’. Yet presumed consent creates precisely the possibility of non-consensual organ removals – that is, the opposite of a donation.
A sense for the contempt of the human being is increasingly lost when one regards one’s fellow humans, with an eye to their bodily constituents, as a resource to be made available through presumed consent. A person ought to be sacred and inviolable to another in their essence and in their body. How can one seek to commit an overreaching violation against what belongs to another human being’s bodily endowment? This is no ‘culture of organ donation’, but lived asociality – a moral bankruptcy.