Dead organ donors? 'If you’re really dead, then no organs can be extracted'

This article follows from "Is organ harvesting driving euthanasia? The ugly truth about why Canada leads in MAiD organ donor transplants." If you have not read the first article in the series, "White coat euthanasia: A license to kill in the name of care?," please read the preface.

In previous articles, it has been emphasized that organ donation is a driving factor in Canada's medical assistance in dying (MAiD) euthanasia program. This article is the first of two that will explore the redefining of death to allow for brain death and cardiac death, which were devised to make organ harvesting and transplants appear legal and moral.

A conundrum - How can MAiD victims donate organs?

Two previous articles about medical assistance in dying (MAiD) by The Gold Report appear to contradict each other. The first article, “The harsh reality of euthanasia: Exposing the myth of a peaceful passing,” highlighted anesthesiologist Dr. Joel Zivot’s assertion that Canada’s MAiD victims likely drown to death. He reached this conclusion after reviewing 200 autopsies of death row inmates in the U.S. The autopsies revealed that their lungs had filled with fluid and that their other organs failed. These inmates died by lethal injection, and MAiD uses similar protocols and the same drugs.

Yet, the second article, “Is organ harvesting driving euthanasia? The ugly truth about why Canada leads in MAiD organ donor transplants,” raises doubts about Dr. Zivot’s conclusion, since donor organs must be in good condition and, according to a report by CTV National News medical correspondent Avis Favaro, that is indeed the case in MAiD deaths.

The international review [of MAiD organ donor transplants] also shows that despite concerns that the cocktail of medications used for assisted death might harm organs, studies from around the world and here in Canada show they are undamaged and work very well after transplantation.

In Quebec, 64 MAiD victims donated organs from 2018 through 2022, as CBC News stated in its report on a study of MAiD Organ donors. Harvested organs included livers, kidneys, and lungs. 

Some key questions

• ‍How can Canada be a leader in organ transplants if the donors drown to death, with lungs and other organs affected?
• Can Dr. Zivot be wrong about MAiD victims dying the same way that those receiving the death penalty do? 
• If Quebec doctors can transplant lungs, livers, and kidneys, why aren't they transplanting hearts, too?

“Every donor is killed in the process”

The possibility of MAiD victims being able to donate organs is even more puzzling because, despite what most people have been led to believe, there is no such thing as a dead organ donor, even a brain-dead organ donor.

Neonatologist Dr. Paul A. Bryne, who established the neonatal intensive care unit at Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital in St. Louis Missouri in 1963, explained in a 2012 talk that organs cannot be harvested from the dead, so the concept of brain death was conceived to make organ transplants appear legal and morally acceptable. Organ Facts reported on his talk:

“Every donor is killed in the process,” he stated.

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Dr. Byrne insisted that there’s no such thing as “brain death”, saying “Brain death was a lie from the beginning. It has always been a lie.”

“Brain death is not true death,” he continued. “Organ transplant is the reason you have to have brain death.”

Dr. Byrne said this term crept into the medical profession following the world’s first heart transplant in 1968. It has since been defined and redefined and is now being replaced by another term known as cardiac death, he noted.

He said donated organs, without exception, must come from a living person. Within minutes of “true death,” which, he explained, is the cessation of circulation and respiration, the organs will begin to die. This is why, when organs are removed from a donor, the beating heart is always taken last. “You cannot get any organs from cadavers,” he noted. “If you’re really dead, then no organs can be extracted.”

Recovery after being declared “brain dead” is also possible, says Dr Byrne, who then demonstrated his point with a televised clip of Zach Dunlap, who spontaneously revived after being declared “brain dead”. He said there are now 175 known long-term survivors of “brain death.” (Emphases added.)

In the video below Dr. Byrne explains that,

[i]t all started when the second-ever heart transplant was performed. They surgically removed a heart out of a 3-day-old baby and transplanted it into an 18-day-old baby, in New York. A short time later, both babies were dead. It was illegal and it was immoral. They had to do something to make it legal. They decided to set up a committee at Harvard, and that committee invented “brain death”. This idea was not, and is not, based on science.

Can you still be dead with a beating heart?

Discover Magazine's article "The Beating Heart Donors" reveals the sordid facts about organ donation and is an excerpt from author Dick Teresi's book "The Undead: Organ Harvesting, the Ice-Water Test, Beating Heart Cadavers--How Medicine Is Blurring the Line Between Life and Death." 

Teresi wrote that if organ donation was as simple and neat as proponents claimed, then "[o]rgan transplants would be peripheral to the story of death." However, it is not as simple as that since the donors are only "pretty dead."

Organ transplants would be peripheral to the story of death if they were what the organ trade claimed them to be: the neat extraction of body parts from totally dead, unfeeling corpses. . . .  The grisly facts compiled in this article . . . [is] knowledge that has been gained from the medical establishment’s obsession with recycling the bodies of people who are, in the words of Dr. Michael DeVita of the University of Pittsburgh’s Medical Center, only “pretty dead.”

. . .  beating-heart cadavers (BHCs) are decidedly different from regular corpses. “I like my dead people cold, stiff, gray, and not breathing,” says DeVita. “The brain dead are warm, pink, and breathing. They look sick, not dead.”‍

Like Dr. Byrne, Teresi also found that many brain-dead donors are still alive, and often show signs of life at the time the organs are going to be or are being removed; surgeons have reportedly gone ahead with the harvesting anyway.[1] Anesthesiologists have raised concerns about the organ harvesting procedure.

Anesthesiologists have been at the forefront of questioning the finality of brain death and whether beating-heart cadavers truly are unfeeling, unaware corpses. They have also begun wondering about what a “pretty dead” donor may experience during a three- to five-hour harvest sans anesthetic, and they are speaking out on the subject.

Teresi provided examples of patients who were too quickly declared dead so that their organs could be harvested:

Gail A. Van Norman, a professor of anesthesiology and bioethics at the University of Washington, cites some disturbing cases.

In one, an anesthesiologist administered a drug to a BHC to treat an episode of tachycardia during a harvest. The donor began to breathe spontaneously just as the surgeon removed his liver. The anesthesiologist reviewed the donor’s chart and found that he had gasped at the end of an apnea test [one of several to determine brain death according to the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death that came up with the term], but a neurosurgeon had declared him dead anyway.

In another case, a 30-year-old patient with severe head trauma was declared brain dead by two doctors. Preparations were made to excise his organs. The on-call anesthesiologist noted that the beating-heart cadaver was breathing spontaneously, but the declaring physicians said that because he was not going to recover he could be declared dead. The harvest proceeded over the objections of the anesthesiologist, who saw the donor move and react to the scalpel with hypertension that had to be treated. It was in vain since the proposed liver recipient died before he could get the organ, which went untransplanted.

And in a third instance, a young woman suffered seizures several hours after delivering her baby. A neurologist said it was a “catastrophic neurologic event,” and she was readied for harvest. At that time the anesthesiologist found that she had small yet reactive pupils, weak corneal reflexes, and a weak gag reflex. After treatment, “the patient coughed, grimaced, and moved all extremities.” She regained consciousness. She suffered significant neurologic deficits but was alert and oriented.

Teresi noted inconvenient truths doctors do their best to ignore,

The brain-death establishment discounts such stories as “anecdotal,” as if they were taken from the National Enquirer. But these three cases appeared in Anesthesiology, the journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, which has 44,000 members.

To learn more about the fallacy of brain death read "Brain Dead” is NOT Dead! LIVE people are murdered daily for organs and to “save money."

Please check back for the next article in this series, "Are MAiD organ donors really dead when their organs are harvested? Waiting five minutes after the heart stops may not be long enough," when The Gold Report reviews the concept of quick cardiac death used to declare MAiD victims dead.

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The information contained in this article is for educational and information purposes only and is not intended as health, medical, financial or legal advice. Always consult a physician, lawyer or other qualified professional regarding any questions you may have about a medical condition, health objectives or legal or financial issues. ‍If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can call a qualified free mental health helpline or seek help from a qualified therapist.

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‍Related articles:‍

• Is organ harvesting driving euthanasia? The ugly truth about why Canada leads in MAiD organ donor transplants‍
• The harsh reality of euthanasia: Exposing the myth of a peaceful passing
• Euthanasia by the numbers: Canadian doctors have already killed the equivalent of a small city‍
• Is euthanasia compassionate if offered to those who don’t want to die and doctors misjudge imminent death?
• White coat euthanasia: A license to kill in the name of care?
• Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) - a cruel way to die but not to the onlooker
• Disabled in Canada? Doctors may pressure you to end your life

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