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No ‘moral certainty’ that brain death is really death: prominent Catholic ethics professor Brugger
BY HILARY WHITE, ROME CORRESPONDENT
Fri Feb 04, 2011 18:21 ESTComments (5)Tags: Benedict Xvi, Brain Death, E. Christian Brugger
ROME February 4, 2011 (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 by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI 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, a Senior Fellow of Ethics at the Culture of Life Foundation gave this judgment in a question and answer article published today by the Rome-based news agency Zenit.
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.”
E. Christian Brugger
“Although we cannot identify the event directly, we can identify biological signs consequent upon the loss of that unity,” said Brugger. But according to many experts, those biological signs are not present in “brain death” cases.
lifesitenews.com/news/no-moral-certainty-that-brain-death-is-really-death-prominent-catholic-ethi
BY HILARY WHITE, ROME CORRESPONDENT
Fri Feb 04, 2011 18:21 ESTComments (5)Tags: Benedict Xvi, Brain Death, E. Christian Brugger
ROME February 4, 2011 (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 by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI 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, a Senior Fellow of Ethics at the Culture of Life Foundation gave this judgment in a question and answer article published today by the Rome-based news agency Zenit.
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.”
E. Christian Brugger
“Although we cannot identify the event directly, we can identify biological signs consequent upon the loss of that unity,” said Brugger. But according to many experts, those biological signs are not present in “brain death” cases.
lifesitenews.com/news/no-moral-certainty-that-brain-death-is-really-death-prominent-catholic-ethi