NY Times Op-Ed: Expanding the Definition of Death Could Mean More Donor Organs
“There is great need for the tissues and organs of the hopelessly comatose in order to restore to health those who are still salvageable.”
You might want to think twice before checking off the organ donor box the next time you renew your driver’s license.
Three physicians from Northwell Health in New York — cardiologist Sandeep Jauhar and heart failure and transplant directors Snehal Patel and Deane Smith — collaborated on a rather thought-provoking op-ed published in The New York Times last week. (The essay can be viewed here.)
They propose an intriguing solution to address the shortage of donor organs available to patients in urgent need: simply expand the definition of death.
The doctors explain that “there are only two reasons a person can be declared dead: Either the heart has stopped or the brain has ceased to function, even if the heart is still beating.”
A person may serve as an organ donor only after being declared dead. (Until then, transplant surgeons are not allowed even to interact with a dying patient.)
Most donor organs today are obtained after brain death, defined by most state laws as a condition of permanent unconsciousness with no spontaneous breathing, no response to pain and no primitive reflexes — in other words, devastation of the whole brain. Organs obtained this way are often relatively healthy, because brain-dead patients can continue to circulate blood and oxygen.
The physicians note that “brain death is rare.” For example, in New York State, “there are on average fewer than 500 cases suitable for organ procurement and transplantation each year.”
Far more often, people die because their heart has permanently stopped beating, which is known as circulatory death. However, precisely because the blood has stopped circulating, organs from people who die this way are often damaged and unsuited for transplantation.
The need for donor organs is urgent. An estimated 15 people die in this country every day waiting for a transplant. We need to figure out how to obtain more healthy organs from donors while maintaining strict ethical standards.
Then, they cut to the chase: “We need to broaden the definition of death.” [Emphasis added.]
Consider how things currently work. In the procedure known as donation after circulatory death, a typical donor is in an irreversible coma from, say, a drug overdose or a massive cerebral hemorrhage, and the heart is beating only because of life support. The donor is still not legally brain-dead; he or she might have, say, a gag reflex or other primitive functions.
In such cases, with the blessing of the family, a donor is brought into an operating room and life support is carefully withdrawn. If, as is expected, the removal of life support results in stoppage of the heart, surgeons will wait long enough to determine that the stoppage is permanent — to be confident of death — but not so long that vital organs get damaged. This period is typically about five minutes. Then the surgeons remove the organs.
But even a few minutes of a stopped heart often results in damage to the organs. This deprives potential recipients of healthy organs and thwarts the wishes of donors to have their organs used to help others.
The doctors describe a fairly new method that is widely used in Europe called “normothermic regional perfusion,” which can “improve the efficacy of donation after circulatory death.”
Doctors take an irreversibly comatose donor off life support long enough to determine that the heart has stopped beating permanently — but then the donor is placed on a machine that circulates oxygen-rich blood through the body to preserve organ function.
Donor organs obtained through this procedure … tend to be much healthier.
Use of this method has sparked considerable ethical debate within the medical community.
The trio briefly considers the possibility that a patient might be declared irreversibly comatose prematurely, and acknowledges that, while rare, it has indeed happened and “it is a catastrophe.”
Still, they argue that the definition of brain death must be broadened “to include irreversibly comatose patients on life support.” This would result in “more organs available for transplantation.”
Finally, the doctors cite a committee of physicians and ethicists at Harvard that was tasked with formulating a definition of brain death in 1968, the same basic definition most states use today. In their initial report, the committee wrote that “there is great need for the tissues and organs of the hopelessly comatose in order to restore to health those who are still salvageable.”
The doctors note that “this frank assessment was edited out of the final report because of a reviewer’s objection. But it is one that should guide death and organ policy today.”
Needless to say, this op-ed stirred considerable debate among readers. Here are some of their reactions:
When I got my first driver's license, a friend warned me not to elect to be an organ donor. "Dude, they're going to try to declare you dead before you are to harvest your organs." I thought that was the stupidest, most paranoid conspiracy theory I'd ever heard.
Now this. pic.twitter.com/67c5n7YZDK
— Jeff Blehar is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) August 1, 2025
Based on what I’ve seen with organ donors and the corrupt medical establishment over the past few years, I removed “organ donor” from my driver’s license when I renewed it in June.
Now this just reinforces my decision.
— Don’t Mutilate Kids (@DontCutKids) August 1, 2025
It wasn’t until I became a lawyer and worked on a few public inquiries into certain hospital..unpleasantness.. that I realized why the medical profession needs to be kept on a ruthlessly short leash
— Allan (@AllanRicharz) August 1, 2025
This article is going to decrease organ donors because now people like me are afraid of overzealous harvesters. pic.twitter.com/KNIWnm1Wyy
— James Crook – The AI Whisperer (@AIScreenplays) August 1, 2025
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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These lunatics are going to single-handedly destroy the organ donor program.
Perhaps the organ donor program is preventing good research into alternatives.
Next step would be including “ voting Republican “ in the Brave New ( woke) World definition of death. The Woke would undoubtedly see a lot of collateral benefits in such an expanded definition.
Lexman:
You almost stole the words from my keyboard. I was going to say something on the order of, “Democrats already firmly believe that anyone that votes Republican IS brain-dead, so once they were back in control of legislation they would simply codify this and declare Republicans to be donors regardless of their medical or mental condition.”
Years ago my sister-in-law had a stroke during surgery and came out of the operating room in a persistent vegetative state. When my husband went down to visit his niece, he described it as “You know the saying, the lights are on but nobody’s home? The lights aren’t even on.”
She didn’t need a vent to breathe or a machine to pump her blood, but we were assured that the PVS was permanent.
Six months later, she woke up with no obvious mental damage, though she was hemiplegic from the stroke.
A neurosurgeon I worked with told me that while we knew a lot about how the brain works, we have no idea why, and he wasn’t at all surprised to hear about SIL’s awakening.
I can only assume that this is the sort of person they want to declare dead for organ harvesting. And yes, I’ll be taking the organ donation symbol off of my license when it gets renewed next year.
FWIW, few people in a vegetative state are intubated and on a respirator. The part of the brain (the medulla oblongata) that controls many involuntary functions like breathing and heart rate works just fine. It’s the higher functions performed by the cerebral cortex that are impaired. About 10% of PVS patients experience some kind of recovery within 12-mos. After that, chances of any kind of recovery fall precipitously. By 24-months, the chances of an even a limited recovery are vanishingly small. After spending 4-tours in Iraq, I surprised myself by how much I learned about TBI and potential outcomes. I’ve seen guys never recover from a head injury that didn’t even break the skin while seeing others lose a quarter of their head but, after years of therapy, be reasonably whole…except for missing a quarter of their head. The brain really is a remarkable organ that is also remarkably complicated.
Don’t wait.
Meanwhile, just scribble over the box and write “NO!” in red pen. It’s a clear legal statement.
You know what would make even more organ donors? Just killing people we don’t like. I’m sure these “doctors” could come up with a list of “undesirables” that they feel should forfeit the right to live.
Similar to your suggestion: have NY legislators pass law requiring convicts sentenced to death, to donate any and all organs which may be helpful to a donee. The death penalty itself would be carried out in a manner, time and place most beneficial to the donee.
See my comment below (search “Larry Niven”) as to why this is, in the words of Mencken, one of those “well-known solutions to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”
Many Democrats think “Deplorables” should be included as ( involuntary) organ donors.
Wow, I have been a nurse for 30 years and I never thought I would see the day where Ghouls like these were allowed to be called Medical Professionals.
There have always been rumors and gossip about certain doctors letting patients die so they could harvest, but I never thought I would see it in actual writing.
I have a modest proposal. Let us select healthy individuals and use them as organ donors. This will get around the problem of damaged organs that are unsuited for transplantation when you have to wait for the heart to permanently stop beating. According to Donor Alliance one organ donor can save up to eight lives. Think how many people we can prevent from dying by this modest sacrifice on the part of these individuals.
Elected officials will be first ones selected,
We could start with the climate change nuts because they think the world will end soon. Why shouldn’t they do some good before they depart?
I nominate all of the people who are pushing for default permission barring opt-out, and all of the people who belong to the committee pushing to cut people up. Some of them in any case are probably guilty of murder.
Need to credit Jonathan Swift, who articulated a very well thought out “modest proposal” to eliminate hunger among the poor of Ireland around the time of the Potato Famine. The key part was that the poor would sell their children as food for the rich.
Maybe we could harvest the organs of the children of the poor? It would put them to a far better use than just eating them.
Better yet, help leftists stand by their ideology—reducing world population, reducing humans’ carbon footprint, feeding the poor—by offing them at a certain age, say 30, and turning them into food. We could call it Soylent Red.
Soon we will be “assumed to be an organ donor unless you opt out.”
The it will be mandatory organ donation. There is money to be made in organ transplanting.
Oh, yes. This is pushed for all of the time.
I’ll just put this here.
Coma
Interesting trivia about Geneviève Bujold:
From Wikipedia:
“In 1994, Bujold was chosen to play Captain Nicole Janeway, the lead character in the ensemble cast of the American television series Star Trek: Voyager. However, she left the project after just two days of filming via mutual decision of both the actress and the producers.”
If I recall correctly, the producers quickly realized they had made a mistake in casting her as Janeway.
I saw that on youtube. The producer is all but said that she was a delicate French actress not tough enough for American TV.
The left leans upon man’s understanding, and the false wisdom will be man’s downfall.
That is why they hoist themselves upon petards as opposed to obedience.
I don’t know the chinese semed to have solved this problem haven’t they?
I was confused by all these comments and explanations on brain dead so I looked it up for myself in the dictionary——and it showed a picture of Joe Biden.
Dictionaries have pictures now?
I didn’t know that.
Some of the newer ones actually have holograms, like the reflective one they always put next to the entry for “credulous.”
I’m sure plenty of people have a story about a friend or relative who was on life support in a supposedly permanent vegetative state, removed from life support who “miraculously” woke up.
Our family had a cousin who was struck by a car in a parking lot. After several weeks, she was diagnosed as PVS, removed from life support, started breathing on her own (How unexpected! said the doctors) and a week later woke completely. (Amazing! What a miracle!)
There were transplant teams standing by.
After covid, my trust in the ethics of the medical profession was permanently and irrevocably damaged.
Exactly. The sins of Covid Mania committed by most members of the medical community and govt policymakers in perpetuating a series of falsehoods to sustain a partisan narrative will endure long after those who directly experienced it are gone.
With any luck.
You don’t have to have a personal experience in order to damage your trust in medical ethics, you just have to read this.
I remember the episode of All In The Family where Meathead was trying to convince Archie to register as an organ donor. The writers made fun of those who decline by having Archie present the ridiculous excuse that he didn’t want his eyes to go to someone who’d use them to watch porno flicks.
I used to think that organ donation was a noble cause, until I realized that those in the medical profession are by and large ignoble.
I will remain an organ donor. I have left clear instructions regarding the conditions under which I wish my life to be sustained, but in a nutshell, if I cannot function on my own and respond to others, I’m ready to move on. Nor do I wish to see my estate depleted of resources that my family could use for their enjoyment merely so I may continue to convert oxygen into carbon dioxide (and I’ll be saving the planet). I even have instruction to move me to a state that allows nonresident assisted suicide. I recognize others may have differing approaches, but I have many friends who feel as I do,
Don’t forget to have the un-re-used portions of your body composted. Seriously. You might as well go all-in.
The CO2 part was a joke. The rest is my choice and in no way affects anyone else’s choice, though I find it amusing that many of the comments here suggest that my choices are naive at best because they disagree with them.
Everybody profits on organ donation except the donor. That puts a bias on the system.
Bingo.
There used to be a rule, “First, do no harm.” Doctors don’t swear that oath anymore and even if they did, oaths don’t seem to have much meaning anymore. But it’s still a great rule.
Murdering a patient because you want their organs for someone else qualifies as doing harm. Even if you think the recipient will make better use of them than the “donor.”
Stop it! Do no harm!
Well, they kill the preborn and harvest their tiny bodies for any and every part, then sell for beacoup bucks.
Why does anyone suppose they’d stop with the preborn?
“First, do no harm” was never part of the Hippocratic Oath. It was part of a separate and more-or-less equal statement of ethics to which doctors were expected to conform. They are often confused.
“He’s moving and trying to speak, we can’t take the organs”
“Give him morphine, that’ll put a stop to it”
It’s probably age dependent. Old people are sort of indifferent to death and if it’s a close call and their organs will do some good, what the hell.
Are you speaking from your own personal experience as an old person who is indifferent to death?
Because I am in my 70s and am hardly “indifferent”. However, I am really, really opposed to dying in a hospital; at home is my irrevocable choice. I want to be neither hurried toward or grotesquely held back from a natural death.
My mother is in her 90s and still says she wants “She didn’t want to go” on her headstone. She’s been saying this for many decades.
I’ve outsmarted them. All of my organs are good and used, not suitable for transplant.
COVID should have been the wake up call for anyone who still trusted the medical profession.
If after COVID you are still an organ donor, you are a darn fool.
And please don’t take offense if you read this, and consider yourself an ethical and decent medical professional. However, I still have a question for you: “Did you raise your voice against the COVID abuses?”
” Chinese seemed to have solved this problem”
*****
I have not read a description of their “organ harvesting” procedures. I remember being in Hong Kong about thirty years ago during the Oct. 1 National day. There was a one week hold on executions in the PRC and there was a major back up of people waiting to go the the Main Land for kidney transplant. Newspapers were describing the stress on the Hong Kong. kidney dialysis facilities. Once executions were resumed, problem resolved.
They solved it by defining an ethnic population as subhuman, same as the Germans would have if transplant technology had been developed by that time.
There are no death panels!
Let’s change the laws to allow family members to sell the organs. Why not? Everyone except the organ donor or donor’s family gets paid, i.e., the hospital, the doctors, the nurses, the pharmacies, the transporters, everyone…except the donor (or their family). Why is it immoral to sell one’s organs but not immoral to take a donated organ and transplant it?
Seems like a good way to get family members to legally murder their relatives. As if financial incentives were not enough.
Joan was quizzical, studied pataphysical
Science in the home
Late nights all alone with a test-tube ohh oh oh oh
Maxwell Edison majoring in medicine
Calls her on the phone
Can I take you out to the pictures, Joan?
But as she’s getting ready to go
A knock comes on the door
Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer
Came down upon her head
Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer
Made sure that she was dead [Enough to be an organ donor]
The Beatles; <“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”
“Ethicists”
I have long believed that the field of “ethics” and the writings of “ethicists” had one main function: to find ways to justify doing the wrong thing, and especially, to justify putting people to death.
Many ethicists split people into worthy of treatment and not. The Germans had a term called “life unworthy of life”.
Personally, the only people who should be classified as “not human” are those ethicists. If were to meet Peter Singer, I would explain that if he were murdered and I were on the jury, I would not convict.
New York State has a law requiring declaration of death to be withheld until the patient’s religious beliefs can be determined. The reason is much of the religious Jewish community does not accept the current medical definition of death (*), and thus keeps, among other things, insurance companies from cutting the patient off. A more serious concern is turning off machines (or, as we call it, “murder”) too early. Many of us have what you might call “reverse living wills” to keep us from being murdered.
(*) What modern science tells us about the line between life and death is that the line is too vague to be defined scientifically. It really becomes a matter of philosophy and religion;
I’ve long wondered why the state condemns the guilty to life in prison “for the rest of their natural lives,” and then goes to extreme lengths to keep them alive when they contract cancer, experience kidney failure, or spring a bad leak from being shivved in the exercise yard. Lifers are meant to die in prison. Why try to save them when circumstances occur that will cause them to die? What is unnatural about dying from something other than old age? Happens to people not in prison all the time.
I’ve been prohibited nearly my entire adult life from donating blood or organs due to a risk of vCJD. They dropped the restrictions 3 years ago but I’m not in any hurry to donate anything.
I remember a joke about someone needing a brain transplant. He was presented with 3 choices, the brain of a great religious leader for $250K, the brain of the CEO of a Fortune 500 company for $750K and the brain from AOC for $1.5 million. The prospective recipient inquired as to why AOC’s brain was so much more expensive than the other two. They told him that it was because it was so small that it would be hard to find in her head and secondly, it had never been used.
Larry Niven wrote a famous science fiction short in 1967 called “The Jigsaw Man.” A criminal is sentenced to death so that his organs can be harvested for transplant. The “shock” ending is that the protagonist’s “capital crime” was speeding tickets and running red lights. These have become capital crimes due to society’s extreme demand for fresh organs: the state has decreased the severity of qualifying crimes in order to satisfy it.
I’d like to say “hell, that didn’t take long,” but 60 years… credit to Niven, I guess, though he didn’t need any unusual vision of the future to predict this, just a solid understanding of human nature and government power.
Larry Niven came to my mind also in relation to this article. I read many of his sci-fi novels years ago. He went further in one with jay walking being a capitol crime.
I fully believe that some of these so called “ethicists” would approve of doing this.
I’ve probably read everything Niven wrote (certainly all of his “Known Space” works), including his collaborations with Jerry Pournelle (read most of his stuff too). Ultimately, Roger Zelazny was my favorite, especially The Chronicles of Amber, Creatures of Light and Darkness, and Lord of Light.
If the definition included recalcitrant psoriasis it would be a windfall for the donor trade.
Monty Python saw so far into the future. “Meaning of Life”:
Cleese: Can we have your liver?
Man: But I’m using it.
“You might want to think twice before checking off the organ donor box the next time you renew your driver’s license.”
I stopped checking it off around age 40, for two reasons.
One is the one that other people have commented about — the organ transplant racket is set up so that everybody involved in it makes TONS of money… except the actual donor! You know, the guy who actually owns the goods that makes the entire process at all possible — he’s LEGALLY PROHIBITED from making a penny off his invaluable contribution, because of “ethics” or some such gaslighting bullshit. Godddamn vultures. If everybody in the chain is going to profit off my meat, I want my loved ones to get their share too.
But secondly, and again according to some BS law, you are PROHIBITED from having a choice as to where your donation goes. I was shocked when I learned that if I donated an organ, it might end up inside someone vile, such as (for example) Sarah Brady, George Soros, Chuck Schumer, or some other incorrigible villain that I had dedicated my entire life to OPPOSING… and neither I nor my family would have any say whatsoever about it, Even worse, it could end up somewhere stupidly useless, like being used to extend the life of a monster on Death Row. Now, I’m a guy who won’t even give to the United Fund or the Red Cross because some portion of their funds inevitably go to left-wing causes (“access to abortions in Botswana” or the like) — I’m certainly not going to parcel out parts of my own body to the same sort of system.
I don’t check that box, and I urge everyone who brings up the subject not to check it, either. It’s the only way we can force reform of an obscenely anti-capitalistic transplant system.
lefty is scummmmmm
but of course
lefty hates life
lefty hates people who love life
lefty acts like they hate life BUT ONLY WHEN THEY ARE VIRTUE SIGNALING…mick obama etc
god these people are fn sickkkkkkk
One more time, regarding medical “professionals”:
Affirmative action destroyed standards.
The Covid Fraud destroyed credibility.
Rampant wokeness destroyed trust.
Alternate plan: use the NYTimes as a organ bank
How about we just leave well enough alone?