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

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.