(LifeSiteNews) — All of us live in a culture now saturated with the concept of euthanasia. One of the ways we got to this point is through the concept of “brain death.” The problem with the concept, however, is that “brain death” is not really death.

Joining me on this important episode of The John-Henry Westen Show is retired neonatologist Dr. Paul Byrne to discuss the issues surrounding so-called “brain death” and how it relates to organ donation. 

Byrne originally got involved in the issue when in 1975, when an infant patient of his named Joseph was unresponsive while living on a ventilator. After a brain wave test yielded results suggesting Joseph suffered “cerebral death,” a finding repeated by a second test, Byrne continued to treat his patient, objecting that Joseph had not died. When Joseph was about five or so months old, Byrne began investigating the issue, eventually finding that the concept of “brain death” has no real scientific basis.

The concept itself, he tells me, was “invented” after a failed illegal heart transplant between two babies in Brooklyn, New York. A Harvard committee released a report called “A Definition of Irreversible Coma” in which it identified “irreversible coma” with death, without any patient data or laboratory testing.

“While we focus on these issues, the most important issues have to do with the difference between life and death,” Byrne tells me, identifying the difference between creation – when someone is conceived – and death, when cell membranes begin to break down after the soul leaves the body. “We know what life is, we know that death is something different. And so the focus ought to be on not declaring someone dead until they are in fact dead.”

Turning his attention to organ donation and transplants, Byrne observes that our society tends to be “trusting,” with the desire among people to do good for others. However, Byrne maintains, God made our organs specifically for us in such a way that they cannot be transplanted. The human process of transplanting, he believes, is an interference with God’s natural process, with the natural exception being pregnancy.

Meanwhile, the person undergoing the transplant exchanges one set of problems for another. The issue of lifelong medication that forces the body to accept transplanted organs, Byrne adds, is a “societal issue” and not just one of cost, looking to the rise of certain infections such as tuberculosis in light of organ transplantation. Further, Byrne says people tend to take the “easier way out” rather than the moral way – something he examines in light of heart transplants, which takes the life of one person for the sake of another.

“Once somebody has this decoration of brain death, the system is going to make them dead, because everybody who is called brain dead, the system makes them dead, either by cutting out their vital organs, or, if they can’t breathe on their own, taking their life support away from them,” Byrne explains. “That’s why they say, ‘Nobody’s recovered from brain death.’”

Much like in Canada, the United States has people who go around seeking organs. The American context uses the name “designated requester,” who, unlike the person’s treating physician, is allowed to discuss transplants with the family. Meanwhile, the phenomenon of people waking up after being declared brain dead has been happening from the beginning, Byrne says.

“It’s a whole team of people that are all participating in this multi-billion-dollar industry which depends on getting healthy organs … and where do you get healthy organs from? Living persons. Can you get a healthy organ from a cadaver? No,” he says.

While one can legally be declared dead while still living, the law itself depends on what medicine says. Both, however, should not contradict philosophy. Philosophy, Byrne says, tells us that men are composites of body and soul. To think about these things, however, we need to isolate them, but in the process, Byrne says, we “mix [them] up,” with our emotions also getting involved regarding the desire to help someone, and thus we can make the wrong decision. The public, he says, relies on the “leadership” of doctors, law, philosophers, and theologians.

For more from Dr. Paul Byrne, tune in to this episode of The John-Henry Westen Show.

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