Against "Brain Death" - of whole and parts. Dr. med., Dr. theol Doyen - Doyen Nguyen

Hirntod-Konferenz / Brain Death Conference: 8. März 2019 in Wien. Das medizinisch-philosophische Konstrukt des Hirntod / The medical-philosophical construct of brain death. Doyen Nguyen und Josef Seifert -
Why should the general public, especially Catholics, be actively engaged in the issue of Death and Organ Donation? One can easily say: “the issue is of no concern to me, it does not touch my personal life.” In reality, this is an issue which does touch every human person. The reason is rather simple: anybody can find him- or herself in the unfortunate situation of being either: (i) a comatose patient who, according to today’s new medical paradigms of death (namely, brain death and controlled cardiac circulatory death), is considered as a potential organ-donor by health professionals, or (ii) a close family member of one such comatose patient.

Life and death are ontological realities standing at opposite ends to one another; yet they are tightly intertwined with each other in organ donation-transplantation. This is why St. Pope John Paul II once stated, “it is conceivable that in order to escape certain and imminent death a patient may need to receive an organ which could be provided by another patient, who may be lying next to him in hospital, but about whose death there still remains some doubt.”

Much of the general public has remained largely uninformed about the real nature of the new medical paradigms of death. They have raised considerable controversies within academic circles, however. At the heart of the ongoing debates is the unsettling question: are donors truly dead when they are declared dead (whether according to the brain death or the controlled cardiac/circulatory death protocol); are they truly dead at the time of the removal of their organs?

Bio Doyen Nguyen, OP, M.D, S.T.D. is both a moral theologian and an academic hematopathologist. A graduate of Temple University Medical School (Philadelpha, USA) and a scholar of the Leopold Schepp Foundation, she is a lay Dominican who, in addition to having worked (and taught medical residents) at various university medical centers, was also a professor of theology at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum) in Rome (Italy) where she obtained her doctorate in moral theology, with a special focus on end-of-life ethics. She has authored books and articles both in medicine and in moral theology/bioethics. Among her recent publications is the 600-page monograph The New Definitions of Death for Organ Donation: A Multidisciplinary Analysis from the Perspective of Christian Ethics (Peter Lang, April 2018. ISBN 978-3-0343-3277-4).