The Brain Death Fallacy: Dr. Heidi Klessig Exposes The Organ Harvesting Industry

by Brian Shilhavy

This is an excellent interview just recently recorded with Dr. Heidi Klessig, author of the book “The Brain Death Fallacy” published in 2023.

Here is a quote from her website, “Respect for Human Life.”

Brain death is still a relatively new idea. In 1968, thirteen men at Harvard Medical School published a landmark paper, “A Definition of Irreversible Coma,” in which they proposed that certain comatose people on a ventilator could be considered to be dead already.

They had no tests, studies, or evidence that these people (who had always previously been considered to be alive) were now somehow “dead.”

Their paper has no scientific references whatsoever. The authors simply presented this new idea on utilitarian grounds: they thought these people were a burden to themselves and to others, and that declaring them to be dead already would free up valuable ICU beds and facilitate organ donation.

Despite the lack of evidence supporting the brain death concept, the idea was codified into US law in 1981 in the Uniform Determination of Death Act.

But are these people actually dead?

Before 1998, the usual justification for brain death was that the brain was the “master integrator” of the body: it was thought that without a functioning brain, death would very quickly occur.

But this old concept was disproven by Dr. D. Alan Shewmon in 1998 when he published a paper detailing 175 cases of people with brain death whose bodies did not disintegrate.

In fact, one of these people remained alive, living at home with his family, for more than 20 years! Because of Dr. Shewmon’s findings, a US Presidential Council was convened in 2008.

Since it was clear that “brain dead” people were not biologically dead, this council proposed a new justification based upon a questionable philosophy: that people who can’t do the work of being people are “dead.”

They very conveniently made the criteria for this new justification the lack of conscious awareness and the lack of spontaneous breathing.

That this justification lacks credibility is obvious: in the womb we neither breathe nor at early stages are we consciously aware…yet no one thinks fetuses are dead, even though some don’t think that they deserve full human rights.

And so today, worldwide, “brain death” continues to be a diagnosis in search of a justification, and which only continues for the sake of the organ transplantation industry which has come to depend upon it.

This is a hotly debated issue in certain medical circles, but the general public is largely unaware of this, since it is not routinely reported on in the corporate media.

So please share this information with as many people as you can, and NEVER choose to be an “organ donor” on your Driver’s license or anywhere else!

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