Reply To: Are hospitals "organ harvest happy"?

Ubiq: the trouble I have with someone reacting to pain is that unlike the chicken (which btw we have a Torah right to kill and benefit from) the person’s skin color and temperature are that of a live person and he is actually breathing, his heart still pumping — albeit assisted mechanically — when the organs are cut out from him (except for the heart which is briefly stopped first). So any so reaction to the knife such as rising blood pressure is truly troublesome to me, and excuse the pun, heartless.

This is the part about higher brain activity after no basic heart stem functions:

And this is the documented case I mentioned regarding spontaneous breathing, also from the same article:

“What if there is sound evidence that you are alive after being declared brain dead? In a 1999 article in the peer-reviewed journal Anesthesiology, Gail A. Van Norman, a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Washington, reported a case in which a 30-year-old patient with severe head trauma began breathing spontaneously after being declared brain dead. The physicians said that, because there was no chance of recovery, he could still be considered dead. The harvest proceeded over the objections of the anesthesiologist, who saw the donor move, and then react to the scalpel with hypertension.”

The only possible caveat is that this author later went on to write a book about this subject, so some considered it a way to drum up business — although his evidence seems sound, and those on the other side have their own motivations.