Rome vs. Harvard on transplants and brain death

Sandro Magister, "Transplants and Brain Death. "L'Osservatore Romano" Has Broken the Taboo" (www.chiesa, September 5, 2008), reports that L'Osservatore Romano," the Pope's newspaper, ran a prominent front-page article three days ago, calling into question whether the 40 year old Harvard criterion for "brain death" (cessation of measurable brain activity) is enough to certify human death.

40 years ago, on August 5, 1968, the "Journal of the American Medical Association" published a document – referred to as the "Harvard report" – promoting the idea that
the total cessation of brain activity, instead of the stopping of the heart, ought to serve as the criterion for the moment of death. The idea seemed plausible, and all the countries of the world, and Catholic officials as well, quickly adopted the same position.

With the L'Osservatore Roman article, however, Rome has reopened the discussion on taking organs from "warm cadavers" while the heart is still beating. Scholars of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, according to Magister, are even more critical of the Harvard Report. Furthermore, when he was a cardinal, Ratzinger gave a speech to the cardinals at the consistory of 1991 on the "threats against life," in which he said, among other things:

Later, those who are not put into an "irreversible" coma by disease or injury will often be put to death to meet the demand for organ transplants, or will be used in medical experimentation as "warm cadavers" ... Finally, when death seems to be near, many will be tempted to hasten this through euthanasia.

Again as pope, Ratzinger published the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which states (no. 476):

Before allowing the noble act of organ donation after death, one must verify that the donor is truly dead.

The inference is that the Holy Father already had strong reservations about the Harvard criterion and the practice derived from it long before he became Pope.

Furthermore, Paolo Becchi, professor of the philosophy of law at the universities of Genoa and Luzern, states in his book, Morte cerebrale e trapianto di organi: Una questione di etica giuridica (Brain death and organ transplant: A question of legal ethics, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2008):

Because there are good arguments today for maintaining that brain death does not mean the real death of the individual, the consequences in the matter of transplants could be truly explosive. And one might wonder when these will be the matter of an official statement of the Church's position.