Federico Lombardi was quick to say that while the L’Osservatore article was “interesting” and should be taken seriously, it does not create new church teaching. Someone capable of giving birth, she implied, defies common sense notions of what it means to be dead. Scaraffia also pointed to cases in which pregnant women have been declared “dead” on the basis of a lack of brain activity, yet kept alive artificially in order to bring the baby to term. “This is contradiction with the concept of the person according to Catholic doctrine, and therefore with the directives of the church in the case of patients in a persistent coma.” “The idea that the human person ceases to exist when the brain no longer functions, while the body, thanks to artificial respiration, is kept alive, implies an identification of the person with brain activity alone,” Scaraffia wrote. Among other things, she noted that the Vatican City-State does not use neurological criteria to certify death. The L’Osservatore article was signed by Lucetta Scaraffia, a history professor who sits on Italy’s national bioethics committee and a frequent contributor to the Vatican newspaper. Critics, however, insist that the use of neurological criteria is a sham – it’s based, they say, not on real science, but on the desire to speed up declarations of death in order to supply a booming market for transplants.Īll this suggests that brain death may be the next front in bioethical controversies. Supporters, who include most physicians, say that given today’s capacity to keep a human body breathing and pumping blood through artificial means, another criterion is required to mark death.

In the wake of a Harvard report recommending a brain death standard 40 years ago, it has become accepted practice in most advanced nations, including the United States. In the United States alone, almost 30,000 people receive organ transplants each year, many of whom would otherwise die. Because organs such as hearts and lungs usually must be removed before respiration and circulation cease in order to be suitable for transplant, going back to cardiopulmonary criteria for death would, in effect, mean that many organ transplants would become impossible. Just like debates over the beginning of life, the question of the moment of death has excruciatingly practical consequences. The article strongly challenged the concept of “brain death,” referring to the collapse of all neurological functions, to certify someone as actually dead. 2 article in L’Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, suggests that an equally agonizing debate is brewing at the other end of the biological continuum – not over when life begins, but when it ends. Debates over when life begins are by now wearily familiar, if no closer to resolution – witness Democratic presidential candidate Barak Obama’s recent comment that pegging a precise moment is “above my pay grade.” Yet a Sept.

Vexing notion definition