Death and Donation: Rethinking Brain Death as a Means for Procuring Transplantable Organs

Since its inception in 1968 the brain-death criterion for human death has enjoyed the status of one of the few relatively well-settled issues in bioethics. However over the last fifteen years or so a growing number of experts in medicine philosophy and religion have come to regard brain death as an untenable criterion for the determination of death. Given that the debate about brain death has occupied a relatively small group of professionals few are aware that brain death fails to correspond to any coherent biological or philosophical conception of death. This is significant for if the brain-dead are not dead then the removal of their vital organs for transplantation is the direct cause of their deaths and a violation of the Dead Donor Rule. This unique monograph synthesizes the social legal medical religious and philosophical problems inherent in current social policy allowing for organ donation under the brain-death criterion. In so doing this bioethical appraisal offers a provocative investigation of the ethical quandaries inherent in the way transplantable organs are currently procured. Drawing together these multidisciplinary threads this book advocates the abandonment of the brain-death criterion in light of its adverse failures and concludes by laying the groundwork for a new policy of death in an effort to further the good of organ donation and transplantation. Scott Hendersons Death and Donation is the most thorough treatment I know of on the ethical issues surrounding the definition of death and organ donation. . . . [M]ust reading for anyone interested in these subjects. -Patrick Lee John N. and Jamie D. McAleer Professor of Bioethics Franciscan University of Steubenville There are few books of which I would say I wish I had written that book myself but Scott Hendersons book is one I wish I could have written. . . . [I]ts chief merit is in its challenge to current standards of the diagnosis of death and to the current practice of organ transplantation. -Michael Potts Professor of Philosophy Methodist University . . . Death and Donation might just inspire a medical revolution and rethinking of organ donation. . . . [A] close reading of the text convinced me that the book may be regarded as the single best book-length study on the issues it treats. -Josef Seifert Full Professor of Philosophy Rector of the International Academy of Philosophy . . . I cannot speak too highly of his application and industry in compiling his deeply thoughtful critique of this truly fundamental change in societys attitude to its most defenseless members. . . . -David W. Evans Fellow Commoner Queens College Cambridge Scott Henderson takes us behind the curtain of organ donation and illuminates the life-and-death issues that heretofore were understood only by trained medical personnel. . . . What Henderson unveils is both fascinating and disturbing. -Rick Walston President Columbia Evangelical Seminary D. Scott Henderson is Assistant Professor of Bioethics at Luther Rice University. He has worked in hospitals in Ohio and Pennsylvania as an in-service lecturer and policy writer and was an adviser and research assistant for the inception of Franciscan Universitys Institute of Bioethics in Steubenville OH.