I've been following the argument about "brain death" and organ donation for several years. It was an impersonal discussion for me until the end of last month when a friend's son was in an ATV accident and landed in the hospital in a coma and on a ventilator. He was showing some improvement a week after the accident and then brain swelling cut off the circulation to part of his brain and the hospital started agitating to do an apnea test where they turn off the ventilator for a few minutes to see if the patient breathes on his own. That triggered the memory of an article I read by Dr. Paul Byrne who said the apnea test often hurts the patient's chances for recovery, causing irreversible brain damage, and begins the process of organ donation. If the patient doesn't breathe on his own the hospital will declare the patient "brain dead," turn the ventilator back on to keep the organs fresh, and begin the process of acquiring and extracting his organs. The patient is still, in fact, very much alive and the removal of vital organs is what actually causes death. You can't live without a heart!
In a culture of death the "harvesting" of organs from patients, even living patients, isn't hard to justify. After all, the babies have been "harvested" for years -- for cosmetics, vaccines, and more recently, embryonic stem cells. Besides, "nobody would want to live like that" (i.e., brain-damaged, unwanted, useless, etc.). People are now one more commodity to buy and sell. There's lots of money in organ donation. Learn more about how people are being hustled into the afterlife, especially young people in traumatic accidents with good healthy organs. There are some real horror stories out there.
For more on brain death and organ donation go here and here.
Please pray for my friends' son and all those facing these tragedies and trying to defend their loved ones from an increasingly pragmatic medical profession that sees sick patients not as individuals to be saved, but organ farms to be harvested.
