There is a point in time to refer to when harvesting human organs became more important than the human life that might still be using those organs. The excuse was born of a new definition of death, i.e., brain death. By simply redefining people with severe brain injury as being brain dead, the provision of the dead donor rule is met by a shifting of terminology. Just change the wording and you've changed the formal explanation and description of death, even though the condition hasn't changed. In 1968, the doctors and ethicists at Harvard University came up with a medical portrayal of "brain dead" patients rather than a conclusion from empirical evidence. The committee at Harvard's Medical School practically said so themselves. The actual death of a person for organ transplantation is now discretionary. It boils down to a lack of discernment of ethics, the branch of knowledge that deals with moral principles.

On April 5, 1968, Harvard Medical School's ad hoc committee published a landmark report defining "irreversible coma" as a new medical criterion for death, laying the foundation for the modern concept of brain death. Because of modern medical intervention, comatose "brain dead" patients could be on life support indefinitely. But are they alive or dead? If alive, it should be ethical to continue life support, while critics say that's not financially feasible to keep the comatose on life support "forever." If truely dead, the best organs have decayed beyond use for organ transplantation. Harvard Medical School's definition of "brain dead" was under scrutiny during Harvard's ad hoc committee's discussion to Examine the Definition of Brain Death, because the best organs need to be "alive" at the time of harvesting for transplantation. This is the beginning of the dead donor conundrum to determine when obtaining organs for transplantation is ethical. Don't expect an honest assessment.

Harvard's report seemed to have some altruistic motives in its findings. But the devil (literally) is in the details. The committee stated that its first purpose was to deal with the burdens on comatose patients and their families as well as on hospitals and other patients needing hospital beds occupied by comatose patients. They established the strategy of defining these patients as dead, thus legitimizing stopping life-support treatment. The "ethicists" at Harvard claimed that defining these patients as dead would also address controversy over obtaining (the best) organs for transplant. In the initial report the committee noted "...there is a great need for the tissues and organs of the hopelessly comatose in order to restore health to those who are still salvageable." That is, those who are healthy except for a failing organ. The phrase "hopelessly comatose" doesn't sound like a declaration of death. The committee's frank assessment was edited out of the final report because of a reviewer's objection. The actual life of the patient became secondary to the base-reasoning of utility.

In a recent press release, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said: "Our findings show that hospitals allowed the organ procurement process to begin when patients showed signs of life, and this is horrifying." Around the time of Kennedy's press release, the New York Times ran an article highlighting multiple cases of organ donors who were not dead. These situations remind me of the movie, "The Princess Bride" (1987), where Billy Crystal's character stands over the "dead" body of the prince and announces "...your friend here is only mostly dead, there's a difference between mostly dead and all dead." This "mostly dead" assessment by Billy Crystal's character in the movie is a frightening reality in the American organ procurement industry. Dr. Frankenstein would approve of these medical proceedings to put together his monster. To the layperson, it's a very complicated methodology the doctors use to determine when it's "ethical" to begin organ retrieval. Eventually, the "hopelessly" comatose patient moves on to the organ procurement practice known as "donation after circulatory death," or DCD. Their treatment switches from patient-focused care to organ-focused care. On the day of organ procurement the patient is removed from life support and there is a two to five minute "no-touch" period to observe any spontaneous return to circulation. Some situations call for the blood supply to the brain to be clamped off for a very short period of time, make a declaration of death, then start the blood flow back to the brain. These types of procedures are all designed to declare death within the shortest interval of time, then remove organs ASAP because only warm organs are suitable for organ salvage. In many countries, the DCD protocol is banned, i.e., Finland, Germany, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Lithuania, Turkey and Japan. Respectively, each of these countries are a predominant religion of either Christianity, Muslim or Buddhist.

The slippery slope is becoming steeper. Organ procurement has become even more goulish because doctors are now openly advocating for death by organ donation. A July, 2026 article by the "prestigious" New England Journal of Medicine proposes the direct killing of people via organ donation: "Contextualizing the Dead Donor Rule in an Era of Voluntary Euthanasia." It's easy to interpret the proposal from the article title. With a little pressure from the good doctors, a mortally ill person, who has only months to live and intended to die by assisted suicide anyway, might as well donate his body as a source of utility for organ donations, without all that dead-donor protocol. The fully live human body is now a commodity, i.e., an economic good like copper and coffee. To sum-up and paraphrase the authors intent in the article is to say: Those who are mortally ill and planning on legal assisted suicide are going to end up dead anyway by their own choice, so precision on the moral timing of death becomes irrelevant in these cases, preferable to the utility of organ procurement. Incredibly, these doctors consider the murder of these types of patients as a moral good.

There is a "logical" step in adding a new classification in the manner of death in America if

euthanasia via organ donation becomes civil law. There would simply be another death-option for the mortally ill when considering assisted suicide. And a physician's death certificate could read: Death by Organ Donation.

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