Well brain death is a general term but if you want to get all techie then consider that as a bunch of rubish. You can lose all sense of perception and thought and still breath on your own. Like a worm or single cell animal acting on predetermined course via DNA. The bain nothing more than a few explicit instruction to regulate metabolism and take in energy. There are multiple layers in the brain and depending on what is killed off or destroyed depends on the state of being. We toss around Persistent Vegetative State with her, or more accurately Cortical Death where the Cerebral Cortex is non-funtioning or severely reduced. It could be completely killed or multiple layers killed reducing funtionality as death of cells penetrate ordered funtion.Quote:
death when respiration and other reflexes are absent; consciousness is gone; organs can be removed for transplantation before the heartbeat stops. Not the case.
Comparing a mentally retarded person being left in the desert to cortical death is condeming something all right: science and rational thought. But for the record I could have gone either way if Mr. Schiavo would have given up custody to her, that's fine... but he decided his wife's fate and if that were my wife I would have done the same thing. And if her parents fought me I would have taken the same course. Hell all those condeming him would, Rush... Shawn... Mike Savage and all the others on the radio . But since there is doubt with the lack of a written will they condemn the decision of a husband even though court after court and medical panel after medical panel agree on cortical death.
Almost forgot; The state does not recognize cortical death as brain death, Rust you are right. Thus the condition we are in with these battles of someone breathing with no consiousness. Much like an amoeba. From a religious standpoint some determine death by the ability of a person to "picture" god. Would she have been alive form that point of view?
