The Diagnosis That Was Designed to Kill Us

We check that little box on our driver’s license and feel good about ourselves. It’s a generous, selfless act—or so we’ve been told. One organ donor can save eight lives. The phrase is practically a bumper sticker at this point, landing exactly the way it was designed to: emotionally, efficiently, and without a single mention of what actually happens to the person doing the donating. As it turns out, that omission is not accidental. No indeed.

In 1968, a committee at Harvard Medical School did something that should have generated considerably more public outrage than it did. They redefined comatose patients on ventilators as dead. Not dying. Not in a state of profound neurological injury. Dead. The motivation, as Dr. Heidi Klessig—board-certified anesthesiologist, pain management specialist, and one of the most credentialed voices on this issue—has documented extensively, was straightforward: a comatose patient on a ventilator has a beating heart and functioning lungs, which means their organs are in excellent condition for harvesting. In other words, the redefinition was engineered to make living people available for organ harvest. Calling them dead solved a very convenient problem.

That redefinition was codified into U.S. law in 1981 as the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) —the legal framework that still governs how death is determined in this country today. We have been living under a definition of death that was engineered, at least in part, to increase the supply of transplantable organs. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is the documented history.

Brain Death Is Not Biological Death
Dr. Klessig’s lecture, Brain Death is NOT Death, lays out the case with the precision you would expect from someone who spent decades in clinical medicine before turning her full attention to this issue. Her path to this work is personal—after her husband Darrel was diagnosed with a brainstem tumor, she left her practice in 2007 to care for him and their family. What she learned in that process set her on a course she hasn’t left since.

The science she cites is credible and well-established. In 1998, neurologist D. Alan Shewmon published a landmark study documenting 175 cases of patients who had been declared brain dead and continued to live—some for years. One patient survived for over fourteen years following a brain death diagnosis. Shewmon has also documented cases where patients resumed spontaneous breathing following the apnea test—the very procedure used to confirm brain death. The apnea test itself, as Dr. Klessig details, is built on parameters the American Academy of Neurology’s (AAN) own guidelines describe as “arbitrary,” carries documented risks including cardiovascular collapse, and can actually cause further brain damage in an already injured patient. Informed consent for this test is not required under the current guidelines. Read that again. Informed consent is not required.

More recently, in 2023, the AAN issued updated brain death diagnosis guidelines that don’t even comply with the UDDA—the very law they are supposed to operate under. What? The UDDA requires the irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brainstem. The 2023 AAN guidelines allow a brain death diagnosis after only partial loss of brain function. We are not splitting legal hairs. We are talking about where the line between life and death is drawn, and it is being moved without our knowledge or consent.

The Names They Don’t Tell Us
The cases coming to light are not abstractions. Misty Hawkins suffered a brain injury after a choking accident. She was not brain-dead, but doctors told her family she would never wake up. Her mother, wanting something good to come from the tragedy, consented to making her daughter a donation after circulatory death—or DCD—donor. Misty was taken to the operating room, removed from life support, and when surgeons sawed through her breastbone to begin procurement, her heart was beating. She had resumed breathing. The harvest was called off. Her family was never told what happened—not by the hospital, not by the organ procurement team. They learned the truth over a year later from a New York Times reporter.

Larry Black Jr. was made a DCD donor just one week after a traumatic brain injury. En route to the operating room, he tried to blink and signal that he was conscious. His efforts were dismissed as reflexes. His neurosurgeon intervened and stopped the harvest. Larry Black Jr. is today a musician and the father of three children.

In a case cited before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee, an Illinois DCD donor self-resuscitated on the operating table during kidney removal. Surgeons noticed pulses had returned and that she was gasping for breath. She was administered large doses of lorazepam and fentanyl, following which she died. The county coroner ruled her death a homicide.

The Harvest Economy
We have written before about the HHS investigation under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy that found 28 patients may have been alive when organ procurement was initiated. DCD donation now accounts for roughly one-third of all organ donations—approximately 20,000 organs last year alone, triple the number from five years prior. The financial pressure to produce transplantable organs is not a background hum. It is a driving force inside a system that has quietly redefined death to keep pace with demand.

Sociologist Renee C. Fox called the DCD protocol an “ignoble form of medically rationalized cannibalism” that “borders on ghoulishness.” Six countries—Finland, Germany, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Hungary, Lithuania, and Turkey—have banned the practice outright.

Dr. Klessig’s book, The Brain Death Fallacy, traces the full history of this diagnosis from the 1968 Harvard committee through the passage of the UDDA and the ongoing battles being waged in courtrooms, legislatures, and operating rooms today. It is built on the work of physicians, philosophers, and scholars who reject the current legal definition of brain death—not because they are anti-science, but because the science doesn’t support it.

What We Can Do
None of this means organ donation is inherently wrong. It means we deserve the full picture before we make that decision—and right now, we are not getting it. The informed consent that should be standard practice in every single corner of medicine has been conspicuously absent from the organ donation conversation for over fifty years. Dr. Klessig’s work exists to change that. We check that box without knowing what we are actually signing. It is long past time that changed.