Introduction

Abstract

With the published report of the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School (1968), many scholars and medical practitioners began to abandon the traditional cardio-pulmonary criterion for determining when a human being has died and to argue that, since the brain is the central organ which regulates the body’s vital metabolic functions, irreversible cessation of the functioning of the brain as a whole—cerebral cortex, cerebellum, and brain stem—constitutes death. This “whole-brain” criterion is based on the understanding that a human organism cannot function as a unified whole without a functioning brain. The whole-brain criterion has received nearly universal legislative approval, beginning with a report by the U.S. President’s Commission for the Study of Ethical Problems in Medicine and Biomedical and Behavioral Research (1981). Soon thereafter, the Catholic Magisterium began to affirm this criterion following the conclusions of two interdisciplinary working groups sponsored by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (Chagas 1986; White et al. 1992). Pope John Paul II (2001) later reaffirmed magisterial support of the whole-brain criterion for determining when a human being has died.