Ethicists Discuss Organ Donation
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PrintRabbis, doctors and lawyers continue discussing the controversial issues of brain death and organ donation in the TorahMusings.com symposium on the ethics of brain death and organ donation. On Sunday, two leading rabbis addressed ethical and legal issues in organ donation and receipt. Rabbi Avi Shafran, Director of Public Affairs of Agudath Israel of America, and Professor Steven H. Resnicoff, Professor at DePaul University College of Law and Co-Director of its Center for Jewish Law & Judaic Studies, explored the tangle of constitutional and religious issues at the core of donating and receiving an organ.
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If someone who is brain dead is halachically alive, a matter of significant halachic debate, secular adoption of the brain death standard could, in a number of ways, lead to the murder of Jews and non-Jews. A goses is someone who is dying and is imminently terminal. His life is likened to the flame of a flickering candle. It is forbidden to touch or move such a person for any purpose other than to help the goses, lest such touching or movement extinguish the flame. According to some rabbinic decisors, including R. Shlomo Zalman Auerbach, people on respirators who are believed to be brain dead have the halachic status of safek goses, to whom these prohibitions would apply. Nevertheless, upon a finding of brain death, secular law would allow a hospital certain rights such as to cease treatment or to extract organs.
Internal organs are most successfully transplanted when “harvested” from a ventilated patient, whose blood remains oxygenated and circulating. From the perspective of halacha, or Jewish religious law, that raises a serious question and, in its wake, ethical dilemmas.
A diagnosis of “brain death” – when tests indicate that a person has suffered irreversible cessation of all brain function – is considered by contemporary medicine and secular law to be sufficient to constitute death, thereby permitting the removal of organs.
In cases involving medical matters, scientific realities play an important role in the deciding of halacha. But Jewish law’s rules, judgments and definitions do not necessarily parallel those either of medical science or society.
