Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth for the Colson Center on Johnstone Street. In a recent guest essay in the New York Times, three medical doctors proposed a solution for the lack of suitable organs available for transplant in the United States. Because an estimated 15 people die every day waiting for a transplant, they said, quote, we need to broaden the definition of death. Their basic argument is that because the existing medical definition of death is too narrow, good organs are left on the table. Most organs donated for transplant can only be taken from someone who's clinically dead, meaning the person's heart has not stopped or there is no brain activity even when the heart continues.
The crisis, say the authors, is because there are too many viable organs damaged by a lack of blood flow. And not enough people are dying with an active heart but a dead brain. Thus, they argue, and I quote, the solution, we believe, is to broaden the definition of brain death to include irreversibly comatose patients on life support. Using this definition, these patients would be legally dead regardless of whether a machine restored the beating of their heart. In other words, people in so called irreversible comas should be considered dead, so that, as long as a person had consented to donate their organs, and I quote again here, removal could proceed without delay.
Now, not only are the authors here asking all of us to ignore the countless accounts of miraculous cases in which people have emerged from comas thought to be irreversible, but also the many cases in which patients have been rushed to death in order to secure their organs. And they're also asking us to ignore the movies. Back in 1978, Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, directed a TV movie called Coma. It starred Michael Douglas. Annette, a young medical student, discovered that otherwise healthy young people were slipping into comas.
The cause was a group of doctors that were hoping to harvest their organs and who used many of the same arguments that were offered in the New York Times piece. As a whistleblower from the UK warned on X in a post that also featured an interview that's worth watching with Dr. Paul Byrne, and I quote here, you cannot take organs from a cadaver. The best organ donors have a beating heart, a circulation under 30 years old, and ideally on a ventilator. Basically, someone is being murdered to give someone else organs.
The entire brain-dead scenario is a lie. ⁇ Now ethical scenarios like this were completely unthinkable until quite recently in human history. Until just a few decades ago, broken or diseased organs basically meant a decins. There wasn't much doctors could do. It was in 1967 that doctors first pulled off the heart transplant.
And since then, thousands of lives have been saved through the transplantation of hearts and other organs. And yet, somehow, over the past few decades, this groundbreaking and remarkable life-saving medical innovation has become a crisis. The ability to transplant organs has become a shortage of organs. Because there are more people that can be saved, we're now told there are more people who need to die.
Now this kind of moral reductionism of human beings is both degrading and dangerous. As Wesley J. Smith put it at National Review in a response to the Times piece, and I quote, we must not yield to the utilitarian temptation to healthcare. Pretending that a patient is dead does not make him deceased. This proposal and others like it have the awful potential to seriously corrode trust in the ethics of transplant medicine among an already wary public, end quote.
A utilitarian view of things basically says that if we can do something, then we must do something. If a good will result in the end, that justifies whatever means it takes to bring those ends. Obviously the Bible is silent on organ donation, but it rejects this end's justify the means approach to moral decisions. And, in the Biblical view, humans can never be reduced to mere bodies, and bodies can never be reduced to disposable and unimportant flesh. In his book, Bioethics, A Primer for Christians, Gilbert Mylander wrote this, quote, This is the sort of slippery slope on which we stand if we permit ourselves to believe that ours is the godlike responsibility of bringing good out of every human tragedy.
Only by supporting organ transplantation in ways that do not lose the meaning of the body as the place of our personal presence, in ways that preserve the possibility of a humane death, and in ways that do not imply that staying alive as long as possible always has moral trump. Can we become people who give thanks for medical progress without worshiping it or placing our trust in it? And becoming such people, we bear a different kind of life-giving witness to our world. In other words, struggling through difficult questions surrounding the meaning of death and organ donation is not optional for the church. To paraphrase C.S.
Lewis, good ethics are necessary if for no other reason than bad ethics exist. These doctors aren't the first ones to make the horrific suggestion that we should pronounce alive people dead, nor will they be the last. Christians who believe that God makes dead people alive should be the very first to speak out and to point to a better way. For the Coulson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr.
Timothy Padgett. A special thanks today to Amy of Wichita, Kansas for being a Cornerstone Monthly partner of the Colson Center. You helped make this episode of Breakpoint possible. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. You can always find more resources like this one at breakpoint.org.
I was not quite old enough yet to drive a car. but I could get my perfectly healthy breast removed. I decided to go all in and to transition. And they really drilled it hard into my mom and dad's head that, like, you're gonna have to choose basically between. Having a Live son or a dead daughter.
And it's the only choice that they give parents. They say it's transition or die. That was Chloe Cole. Her incredible story is told in the upcoming documentary film Truth Rising from the Coulson Center and Focus on the Family. Chloe has gone from being confused about gender ideology to being a courageous voice of reason and truth, helping other victims of it.
And despite all the public backlash, Chloe continues to speak the truth with compassion. Hear Chloe's courageous story and Truth Rising, don't miss the global premiere on September the 5th.
