The Shocking Truth about Brain Death and Organ Harvest

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He said, okay, classic, what's your anesthetic plan of care? So I said, well, I think I'll give him a paralyzing agent so he doesn't move during the surgery.

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So then he looked at me and he said, are you going to give anything to block consciousness? And I was stunned.

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I said, why would I do that? Isn't he dead? And my attending just gave me this long look and he said, why don't you give one just in case?

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And he walked away. Welcome once again to the

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Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. And we have a special episode for you today.

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Something that's been on my mind for years actually. And that is the question of when does someone actually die?

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When does their spirit depart? Spiritually in the Bible, we look at examples of people dying and we normally think of the separation of the body and the spirit as that point at which someone dies.

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But in the medical community, there are other standards for trying to determine this. And of course, the lack of certain kinds of brain activity seem to be the standard by which many of our institutions are determining whether or not someone's dead and ready to have their organs harvested if they're listed as someone who's donating their organs to science or to the medical community.

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So I wanna get into this because I think it's important. It's important for all of you in the audience, especially if you want to be an organ donor or an organ donor, your license might say that.

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Also, if you're in the medical community, I think you just need to be aware of where things are headed and it might not just be a very good direction.

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And as Christians, we wanna think through things biblically. So in order to do this, I have invited a special guest on the program,

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Dr. Heidi Klesig. She is with the organization Respect for Human Life. You can go find out more about them at respectforhumanlife .com.

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She speaks all over the country. She's been on a number of podcasts talking about this topic and you can also go to that website to follow her on social media.

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So thank you so much, Dr. Klesig for coming on the show and being willing to talk about this subject.

02:26

Well, thank you so much for inviting me. It's my pleasure. Well, talk to me a little bit about your story, how you got into this.

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It's not a topic I see a lot of medical professionals wanting to touch, especially publicly.

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So what prompted you to talk about this? Well, first of all, nobody likes to think about death or talk about death.

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And so we sort of put it off and put it off until suddenly we're in a crisis. And now we haven't slept, we haven't eaten, we're confronted with say a sick child on a ventilator and we're not able to come to grips with what's going on.

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So I'm here to help people sort these things out ahead of time so that when the worst day of your life happens, you haven't been blindsided.

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You've had a chance to think these things over ahead of time. And the reason I like to do that is because I was blindsided.

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I came in one night during my anesthesiology residency training program for night call and walked into the operating room and up to the desk and reported for duty.

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And the doctor there said, oh, Klesig, glad you're here. We're gonna have you go up to ICU. We've got a brain dead man that you're gonna bring down and anesthetize for an organ harvesting.

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I was a little bit shocked. I hadn't really thought about that very much.

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I seem to remember I'd heard something about brain death back in medical school but I didn't have all the facts right to hand.

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And so I didn't wanna look stupid. So I just said, gosh, brain death, is there anything different about this that I need to know?

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And he kind of laughed and rolled his eyes and he said, just be sure someone has actually declared him brain dead.

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You know how eager the transplant team can be? Well, that didn't reassure me at all but I took a deep breath and went up to ICU and I found my patient.

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He was a young man about my own age. At the time he'd been in a motorcycle accident and yes, he'd had a head injury and the neurologist had indeed declared him to be brain dead.

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But when I went to look at my patient, he didn't look dead. He was warm, he was pink, he had good blood pressure, good heart rate, he had excellent oxygen saturation on the monitor.

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I listened to his heart, I listened to his breathing. He looked like every other ICU patient I had anesthetized and actually better than most.

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He wasn't on much for medication and he was very stable. So I came back down to the operating room and I found the doctor who was gonna supervise me for the case and presented the facts to him.

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He said, okay, classic, what's your anesthetic plan of care? So I said, well, I think I'll give him a paralyzing agent so he doesn't move during the surgery that makes it difficult for surgeons to operate if people are moving around when they're trying to operate.

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And then I said, I'll give him, I think I'll give him some fentanyl as a potent painkiller and that'll blunt any heart rate or blood pressure responses to the incisions that might damage his organs.

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So then he looked at me and he said, are you going to give anything to block consciousness? And I was stunned.

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I said, why would I do that? Isn't he dead? And my attending just gave me this long look and he said, why don't you give one just in case?

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And he walked away. Well, that made absolutely no sense to me.

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But when you're training to become a doctor or a nurse, a lot of things don't make sense.

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You're being trained to think and act and do things in a certain way. And to my shame and regret,

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I just did what I was told, even though it seemed wrong. I brought that young man down and I gave him the anesthetic we had proposed.

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I'm here to tell you, he reacted to the incisions, to the bone saws, to the removal of organs.

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Just like anyone else, he required the same types of anesthetic. He required the same amounts of anesthetic.

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And looking back on it, I'm a hundred percent sure that young man's eternal spirit was still in his body at the time we began that surgery.

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And it was the removal of his organs that caused his death. So I truly believe

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I am personally complicit in a medical homicide. And I had to repent before a holy

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God about that. And the reason I speak now is that I don't want other people to have to go through what

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I have had to go through. I want people to have transparency. I want them to have the facts about what's been going on in the realm of organ procurement.

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Wow, I had not heard that story. That is, it's disturbing obviously, but it's just,

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I think the crazy thing is that you as someone in training early on in your career are, you're kind of like corralled into this.

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Like you have questions, there's multiple moments of hesitation, but you're constantly told to stifle that.

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And it reminds me a little bit of, my mom I mentioned off air was an RN and it reminds me of some of what she's talked about, not regarding that, but regarding in medical training, assisting abortions and the way that you're supposed to just compartmentalize, put your conscience away.

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These are the procedures that we do and you just have to follow orders.

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And obviously though, if the orders are immoral, we shouldn't just follow orders. So you had this experience, which obviously the

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Lord has forgiven you for, you've repented and all of that, but this must have then done something to your spirit over the course of time, but was it an immediate just a feeling of guilt that you needed to go and figure this out or did it take years for you to process what had happened there?

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What happened after work? I'll tell you, I just stuffed it down at the time and went to work, put my head down, did what

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I was meant to do. And it was the only time that I was given this situation.

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When you're a junior resident, they give you the organ procurements, the harvest, because what can go wrong?

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They're dead already, right? But as you become a more senior resident, you do the recipients of the organs, which are very difficult anesthetics.

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These people with organ failure are very sick. And so I never really had to be confronted with it again.

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And then when I entered practice, I only practiced operating room anesthesiology in the community for a year before opening a pain clinic with a partner of mine.

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And then I did outpatient, walking, talking people the rest of my career and it never really came up.

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Then in 2006, my husband was diagnosed with a brainstem tumor.

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And they told us that that was incompatible with life and we should take time to spend time with each other.

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So I sold my practice at that time. We downsized and kind of hugged our children close and God be praised, the doctors were wrong about that too.

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Here we are nearly 20 years later and he's still alive. So we've had a really fun time.

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But when I retired, I had more time to reflect about a lot of things as you can well imagine.

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But about 2012, a science writer named Dick Teresi wrote a book about brain death.

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And he's a self -proclaimed atheist. He's not a man of faith, but he came right out and said, these people are not dead.

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They've just been redefined as being dead. And I read that book and I thought of my patient both years later, it was still so clear to me.

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So I called a friend of mine who was a doctor specializing in medical ethics. And he said,

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Heidi, you're absolutely right. Brain death is a social construct in a legal fallacy.

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These people are not dead. So then I started just researching it more for myself.

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And I was absolutely shocked to find that for the last 50, 60 years, doctors, lawyers, philosophers, scholars have been questioning the brain death idea vehemently in the professional and academic literature.

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But the public is never told. The public only gets slogans, propaganda, give the gift of life, be a good altruistic citizen.

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They're not told that people truly do not believe that this is biological death.

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The spirit has not yet departed. What's the incentive for this? Maybe give us a little history because it sounds like at one time, the medical community did not believe in this concept of as you call it, brain death.

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And then at some point, everyone now, we got to the point everyone believes that, or at least that's just how the system works.

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And I don't know if it's a combination of things. Is it philosophical? Is it a monetary incentive? Because the organ donor market is, it just made you make money by doing those procedures.

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What happened? How did we get from where we were to where we are now? For thousands of years, you did not need a doctor to tell you if someone was dead.

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I mean, death was recognized at home, on the farm, on the battlefield, right?

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People would look and they would see that there was the absence of every organ function beyond all possibility of return.

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And over time, people would use sort of the index functions of loss of heart rate, loss of breathing, and the passage of time to be sure people had died.

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And the passage of time was sort of a big deal. And it was not only to be sure the patient had, or the person had died, but also to give people time to come to grips with it.

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I mean, that's where we get our traditions of the wake, of the vigil. You know, it gave people time to adjust their ideas that my loved one has departed.

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He's no longer with us. You know, historically people of many faiths have identified the departure of the spirit as being the exact moment that death occurs.

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But because the spirit is immaterial, we don't have any device to tell us that exact moment when the spirit departs.

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So that's why we go with these biological signs like lack of heart rate, lack of breathing, passage of time, right?

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But in 1968, 13 men at Harvard Medical School came up with a new idea.

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They wrote a landmark article in the Journal of the American Medical Association. The title of the article is

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A Definition of Irreversible Coma. And they said, our primary purpose is to define irreversible coma as a new criterion for death.

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Now, they had no facts, they had no data, they had no studies, they had no evidence. There's not a single scientific reference on this paper.

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They just wanted to change the definition for utility. They said, these people's lives are a burden to themselves and others.

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And calling these neurologically injured people who had previously always been considered to be alive, calling them now somehow dead already would have the utilitarian benefits of freeing up ICU beds and removing the controversy about harvesting their organs.

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So it was a utilitarian idea from the get -go. So what about someone who is in a coma?

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Maybe similar to this patient you described in a motorcycle accident and they're in a coma. What would have been the protocol before these utilitarian ethicists got involved?

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Would you just, would that person be hooked up to machines or like for years?

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Or I don't know, like that's usually the comeback that I hear is like, well, if someone's organs could all be working but their brain isn't functioning, therefore you're just helping organs keep moving.

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And it could happen, that could happen for months, for years, you could keep these things alive, but the person's not actually there because they're never going to communicate again, understand, there's nothing going on upstairs.

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Yeah, and that's what those men at Harvard Medical School were saying. They had this idea that there would be wards and wards of people on ventilators stacked up for years, right?

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The thing is medical science improves over time and the people who in 1968 were thought to be irreversible, now a lot of those people we can save and rehabilitate.

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So it's not something that doctors are really able to do. And interestingly in 1981, this idea of brain death was codified into US law as the

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Uniform Determination of Death Act. And the way the law is written, there are now two ways you can be legally dead in the

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United States. The first is the traditional cardiorespiratory standard, the irreversible cessation of the circulatory and respiratory functions.

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The second is the neurologic standard, the irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem is dead.

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Now, the problem is the word irreversible. And again, doctors are not omniscient.

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They do not know for sure what is irreversible. In fact, there was recently a study in the

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New England Journal of Medicine where they found 25%, a fourth of people that doctors thought were completely comatose actually were awake and listening.

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They were just sort of locked in there and unable to respond. And that condition is called cognitive motor dissociation.

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And there have been patients who were declared brain dead. Zach Dunlap in 2007 is a famous case.

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He was a young man who had a terrible four -wheel ATV accident.

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He flipped over, he landed on his head. He was brought to the hospital with brain tissue coming out of his ear.

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He was very massively injured and the doctors declared him brain dead.

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But his cousin, his cousin didn't think he was dead. And he went up to Zach and he took out his clothes clasp knife, right?

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And he scratched Zach's foot and Zach withdrew. So his cousin calls the nurse over, look, look, my cousin's moving.

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And the nurse said, oh, you know, they teach us in brain death school that they can be moving, but they're still dead.

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So then Zach's cousin went over and he gave him a firmer stimulus on his hand. And Zach about took a swing at him.

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And the nurse said, whoa, you know, that movement crossed the midline, that means something. So, I mean, the helicopter was landing with the team to take

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Zach's organs. And that's when his cousin, not his healthcare team, but his cousin demonstrated that Zach was not dead.

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Now, Zach later, Zach made a complete recovery. He got out of the hospital, he's gotten married, he's got a little girl, he works a job.

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He told Dr. Paul Byrne in an interview that while this was going on, he could hear every word.

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He heard the doctors telling his mom and dad, you know, Zach's brain dead. You know, you want to consider him to be an organ donor.

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And he couldn't move. He couldn't sign. He said, I wanted to scream. I wanted to shout. I couldn't do anything.

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I just got extremely angry, you know. And it actually, there's a medical condition that allows me to explain this to you that has been described.

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Would you like me to do that? Please. Okay, in 1999, a Brazilian neuroscientist,

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Dr. Cicero Coimbra described a condition called global ischemic penumbra, which is too many syllables.

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So I'm going to say GIP. Okay, GIP is a situation where the brain, because of a head injury, the brain swells and that swelling decreases the amount of blood flow that can get to the brain.

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So when your brain blood flow drops below 50 % of normal, like every other organ, the brain shuts down its functions to save energy.

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But tissue destruction doesn't begin until brain blood flow drops below 20 % of normal for several hours.

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So between 20 % of normal flow and 50 % of normal flow, the brain is going to be quiet.

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It's not going to respond to testing, but the brain is not destroyed.

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So with continued efforts to improve that cerebral blood flow, healing is still possible.

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But while the brain is quiet, it's going to fail all the tests for brain death and it's going to look like the brain is destroyed.

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I tell people, this is sort of like, it's analogous to when you have a power outage in your home.

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You know, when lightning strikes and suddenly nothing works, but the wiring isn't destroyed, right?

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Get that current flowing again and the lights will come back on. And in the same way, during that period of GIP, nothing works, but with continued efforts to improve cerebral blood flow, the lights could come back on for some of these people as well, at least, you know, partially.

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So again, we're in such a hurry to declare brain death. You know, the new American Academy of Neurology brain death guideline allows brain death to be declared 24 hours after injury in adults and 48 hours in children.

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And that's not enough time. I mean, if you've ever had a sprained ankle, you know it takes more time than that for the swelling to come down.

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And the same thing with brain swelling. So we're taking people off to the operating room to become organ donors way too soon.

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We need to give them more time to heal. It really bothers me, as you can tell. I get very upset saying these things.

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It bothers me. I think of an analogy I thought of as soon as you said that was when my computer is in sleep mode,

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I put it in sleep mode and I can just click a button and it'll come back on, but it's not emitting light.

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It's not making sounds. It's not doing anything when it's in sleep mode. And that sounds like what's happening to the brain.

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It goes into a sleep mode. It's not using power, but it's ready to come back on.

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And so if someone came and saw the computer in sleep mode and said, well, the hard drive is fried, you're never gonna get this back.

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That would obviously be inaccurate. It does make me never want to put on my license to put that I'm an organ donor though.

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And I do have family members who are organ donors and I'm wondering what

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I should even tell them because I know they mean well, and they want to make sure that if they are in fact really dead, that someone else can take advantage of their body.

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But are they dead? That's the question. Is there a solution to that?

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Do you have any recommendation for people who, yeah. Well, let me start, here's the biology lesson, okay?

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Dead people cannot donate organs, okay? Organs are, they're very complicated structures and they very quickly begin to break down and become unsuitable for transplant once circulation stops.

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Dead people, biologically dead people can donate tissues. Now tissues for a doctor aren't puffs and Kleenex, right?

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Tissues to a doctor are things like skin, bone, corneas, heart valves.

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Those things can ethically be taken from a biologically dead body.

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So those things would be all right. The problem is if you register as a donor, most people don't realize that this is a legally binding document, even though you were never given any type of informed consent about, or transparency about the transplantation processes when you sign this, you are legally bound to become a donor.

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And in fact, organ procurement organizations have successfully sued families in court and removed organs from a family member over the objections of family.

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I just posted on X about this, a sad case, Elijah Smith was a young man and this was back in 2013.

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He was on a bicycle riding home from work and he was struck by a car. And the family said, we see signs of life in Elijah.

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We don't want him to have his organs taken. And the organ procurement organization said, well, he signed a donor registration.

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They took it to court. The judge said, yes, it's a legally binding thing. And they harvested

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Elijah's organs over the objections of his family. And I can't imagine having to live with that as a mom or dad, that this was done to your child even above your refusal.

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So I would recommend that nobody be a registered organ donor. Now, it might sound strange to hear me say this, but I am not against transplant.

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Now, how can I simultaneously hold both those views? All right, I'll kind of explain.

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If you're a registered organ, again, your organs and tissues will be taken despite whatever your family wants done with you because they're the ones that have to live with this forevermore, right?

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But you can still become a donor as a living donor.

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Now, living donation is perfectly acceptable, ethical, wonderful way to give somebody in need an organ.

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So living donation is the type of donation where both the donor and the recipient remain alive after the procedure.

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So we have a lady at our church who donated a kidney to her young daughter who had a genetic disease that needed a kidney.

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And that daughter has lived more than 20 years now. And honestly, living donations are some of the most successful donations because they take both the donor and the recipient to adjoining operating rooms oftentimes.

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And my friend says, they took my kidney out and they carried it like a baby over to my daughter and it never had to go through cold storage or injection of preservatives or anything like that.

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And so that's a wonderful way to do that. And you can actually donate most organs that way.

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Anything like a kidney, a lobe of a liver. I have friends that gave a child a lobe of a liver.

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I just found out recently they actually can do lung transplants this way. They can give the recipient a lobe from each of two donors.

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Now, obviously, you're gonna say, Dr. Klessig, you can't donate a heart that way. And you would be right.

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You can't morally self -murder yourself to give a heart to someone else.

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But the good news is there's a totally implantable artificial heart currently in clinical trials.

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And really, I think if we hadn't been pouring so much of our research dollars into this unethical system that we have now,

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I think we would have come up with better, more ethical solutions for people with organ failure by now.

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That's fascinating. So I go to a gym that has one of those theater things, where they play movies, right?

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And once in a while, I'll go in there for usually like five or 10 minutes as I'm warming up to work out.

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And the other day, I went in there and I did my five -minute workout. And they had a movie playing called

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Two Hearts. Have you heard of this? No, I don't know that one. Okay, so it's a Netflix movie,

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I guess. And from the little I saw, the premise seems to be, and it's romanticized, that there's a young man and his girlfriend, it plays up this love story.

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And then he gets, I think it's into a car accident, some kind of injury, and he's an organ donor.

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And then it parallels a story of an older couple with, I think it's a man who, they're also in love, but he's dying now.

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He's like in his 70s or something. And from what I understand, the premise of the movie is to show that the love never ended, right?

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They took his heart and gave it to this older gentleman and look at the good that came out of.

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And I think it actually traces other people, and it's supposedly based on a true story, who received other organs from this kid.

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And kid, I say he's in his 20s, I guess. But look, they all have love stories in their own life.

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They all have families, all people that care about them. And look how much the love was multiplied.

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This one person died, but through him, now he lives in these like five other people, especially the one who's on his deathbed and needs a heart.

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And I just was amazed at how romanticized it was, how much they were playing this up.

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I think I went in there probably around the end of the movie. So I'm like getting the sort of like the whole story encapsulated at the end.

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But it's seen as a very good thing. Like you used the word altruism before.

28:53

It seems like it's a sacrifice and look at the good that's coming out of this.

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Now I'm listening to what you're saying and I'm just thinking like, man, that was propaganda. I think like that was a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.

29:11

And that's what that was. That was a spoonful of sugar to make you feel good about that.

29:16

But man, I don't want my name on any organ donor list or at least the kind that go on your license in case of an injury or something like that.

29:28

Cause I mean, this is scary stuff. I think a lot of people listening to what you're saying are gonna be reevaluating this.

29:34

Well, we really need to look at it. I mean, think of all the ways this is being done wrong.

29:40

I mean, the easiest one I think we can start with that everyone would agree about is what's going on in communist

29:45

China. So in communist China, they are taking prisoners of conscience. These are the

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Falun Gong practitioners, the Uyghur Muslims, the house church Christians, anyone else the government thinks is an enemy of the state.

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They incarcerate them. They force them to undergo blood and tissue typing. And then they put their organs on the market for transplant tourists.

30:07

And transplant tourists come from around the world. You can schedule your heart transplant.

30:14

So this was sort of exposed when an Israeli doctor had a patient come and say, doc,

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I need a pre -op physical. I'm scheduled to have a heart transplant on this day in China.

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And the doctor said, wait a minute, how can you schedule a heart transplant? How do you know a suitable donor will be available on that day?

30:33

Well, the reason is they know that prisoner will be taken to the operating room and his organs will be removed on the day you show up.

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Now, I think we can all agree that is murder. That is wrong, right? Then we can look at the case of organ trafficking.

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And this is going on as well, where in a third world country, an impoverished person is being paid a paltry sum to give a kidney to a wealthy

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Western recipient, right? Now, the Bible has nothing good to say about exploiting the poor.

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And I tell you, taking out a kidney is major surgery. I mean, my friend who gave a kidney to her daughter had big time complications that took time and money and hospitalizations to heal.

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And I don't think that's available for people in Afghanistan and Pakistan. So again, exploiting people for an organ monetarily,

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I think is wrong. The Bible has nothing good to say about murder. Honestly, if you take a neurologically injured person and you end their life by organ removal,

31:37

I don't have a better word for that. I mean, we can sugarcoat it and call it medical aid in dying.

31:44

We can call it physician assisted death, but it ends up being the same thing. And again, some of those people who were diagnosed as being irretrievably brain dead have gone on to recover.

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So it's not something that I think that a Christian can do. There's a couple of newer, relatively newer ways to become an organ donor that are equally problematic.

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Donation after circulatory death is another way you can become an organ donor.

32:12

Now that began in the early 1990s. This idea is for people who are not brain dead, but these people are either they're very sick and not expected to survive, or they've simply decided that their quality of life is unacceptable and they would like to have their medical care discontinued in a way that allows their organs to be procured.

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So what happens is these people are made, do not resuscitate or given a DNR order because all of the

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DCD or donation after circulatory death donors could be resuscitated, but a decision has been made not to do so.

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And then they're brought to the operating room and they are put on the table, readied for surgery as soon as possible after their heart stops, their ventilator is taken off, their drips and infusions are stopped, and doctors simply wait for them to go into cardiac arrest.

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Once their heart stops beating, doctors observe a two to five minute no touch period to be sure the heart won't spontaneously resume beating.

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And then organ procurement begins as quickly as possible because as I mentioned, warm organs become very quickly unsuitable for transplantation in the absence of circulation.

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But the question is, are you dead two to five minutes after your heart stops beating?

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Honestly, it's well documented that people are routinely resuscitated during that timeframe.

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And if you could be resuscitated, you were never dead. I mean, there's a difference between resuscitation and resurrection.

34:00

Resuscitation, doctors can resuscitate you if there's still life in your body. Once you're biologically dead, your spirit is departed, that takes a divine act of resurrection to bring that person back.

34:14

So what doctors do is resuscitation. And everybody knows people are routinely resuscitated two to five minutes after pulselessness occurs.

34:24

So if you start taking organs at two to five minutes, that person is still capable of resuscitation and is not dead.

34:32

In fact, Dr. Ari Jaffe in Canada combed the medical literature and he found a dozen cases of people who self -resuscitated with no medical intervention whatsoever up to 10 minutes after cardiac arrest.

34:48

And some of these made a complete recovery. They were normal afterward. So taking organs two to five minutes after pulselessness, these people aren't dead.

34:58

And if perhaps you saw the recent New York Times article, I think it came out just last month on July, I wanna say

35:05

July 20th, it was a Sunday paper. The New York Times actually reported on a whole series of these cases of DCD donors who were not dead at the time their organs were procured.

35:18

They had a very disturbing case of a young woman named Misty Hawkins. She was a neurologically impaired young woman living at home with her family when she choked while eating her lunch.

35:30

And because of her choking had a low oxygen brain injury, she was in the hospital and the doctors told

35:37

Misty's parents that your daughter is not going to get better. She's never going to wake up.

35:42

Maybe you would like to consider withdrawing her care and allowing her to become a DCD organ donor.

35:49

And Misty's parents didn't want their daughter to suffer and they thought it would be nice to let some good come out of their tragedy.

35:55

So they agreed to this. So Misty is not allowed to die in the arms of her family, right?

36:01

She's taken to a cold operating room among gloved, gowned and masked strangers who put her on the table, take off her ventilator and wait for her heart to stop.

36:10

Well, it took 103 minutes, but her heart did stop. They gave her the five minute sort of no touch period and then they started in on the surgery.

36:22

But when they saw an open Misty's breastbone, they found her heart had started beating again.

36:29

I mean, Misty was not dead. None of them are dead after two to five minutes of this wave off period.

36:35

And she was gasping for breath. So the really sad part, if it could get worse, is that the doctors at that point, they left the room and they had another doctor sew her up.

36:47

It's not clear if she ever received any anesthetic for that. And they never told

36:53

Misty's parents. The organ procurement team called Misty's mom on the phone and said, oh, it didn't work out.

37:00

You know, Misty just wasn't able to become an organ donor. And that's all they knew until a year later when the

37:07

New York Times called them for comment. They were never told that their daughter was not dead when they saw it open her breastbone.

37:16

I mean, the lack of transparency, it's just as gut -wrenching as what's going on.

37:22

I never thought I'd say, God bless the New York Times, but I'm glad that - Once in a while, once in a while.

37:28

That's right, they exposed. And I'm glad that they're doing that. It's good to hear that even an outlet that I would assume or I would presume more that they would be backing up the medical standards on this.

37:42

I'm glad they're being suspicious of it. You know, I was thinking as you were talking a little bit about the Terri Schiavo case and how that was when

37:50

I was, I think, an early, maybe mid -teenager when that happened. And so that was a bit formative for me.

37:55

And it raised a lot of these questions about when someone dies. Because Terri Schiavo, it seemed was obviously, she was younger, she was giving signs of cognition even, and they still, her husband, or I guess at that point,

38:09

I don't know if they had, if the divorce was final or not, or maybe her ex -husband had achieved a,

38:17

I guess, a DNR and she wasn't able to have water or food or anything.

38:23

And that made no sense to a lot of Americans at that time. Even Jesse Jackson, as I remember, went and protested that.

38:30

I mean, you had Americans on the right and the left uniting to say this is wrong. But when it,

38:36

I guess the question I have is when it comes to someone who's older, when grandpa is 90 years old and he's lived a good life, and it seems like the situation becomes different a little bit because now, obviously, if grandpa is still cognitive, no, right?

38:53

You know, you keep grandpa alive. But what if he says,

38:59

I'm tired, which my grandpa's, both of them were kind of like this. I'm tired, one in particular,

39:06

I'm ready to go. Don't resuscitate me if I go into cardiac arrest or something.

39:15

I guess the question I have is where's the line on that? Or do you see a line there?

39:21

Because I don't want a prolonged death either, which is, that's the argument that I usually hear is we don't want to end someone's life, but we don't want to prolong their death process either.

39:31

Yeah, most people describe that as ordinary measures versus extraordinary measures. So, you know,

39:36

Terry Scheibel was taking ordinary measures. I mean, food and water are pretty ordinary.

39:42

You know, doing electric shocks and intubations and putting people on ventilators, that's generally considered extraordinary.

39:50

And it is perfectly fine for the patient and the family to decide together that they don't want those extraordinary things.

39:57

But, you know, what happened to Terry Scheibel, I agree with you, was absolutely horrendous. And even the more so, there was another gentleman,

40:05

I don't know if you remember his case, his name was Terry Wallace. He was like Terry Scheibel, his doctors thought he was in a permanent vegetative state.

40:15

But after 19 years, he woke up asking for his mom and a Pepsi. I mean, even an adult brain can heal slowly over time.

40:24

And as they looked back on his case, the family had been saying, you know, we think

40:30

Terry's, you know, responsive in there, but the doctors were like, oh, you know, those poor family, they're so deluded.

40:36

They didn't - Yeah, there was a video. She was blinking, I still remember that. Yeah. She was blinking and communicating that way.

40:43

But - Yeah, yeah. But now we're having an investigation. I mean, the Health and Human Services Secretary, RFK Jr.

40:50

is running an investigation into the organ transplant system right now, which is long overdue because of these evidence that people are showing signs of life when the organ procurement process begins.

41:02

So that's a good thing. Yeah, well, I wanted to get into that a little bit just here more towards the end, because I think people are rightly upset that this is happening.

41:12

And maybe even members of the audience are thinking back to, man, I have a family member who was an organ donor, and I'm wondering now,

41:20

I never thought about it, but now I am wondering, was he or she actually dead? Did their spirit depart?

41:26

Which is, I think, from a Christian understanding, especially, and I don't think you can separate this from ethics, and ethics is gonna derive from a religious view of some kind, but there's, you have a soul that separates you from the animal kingdom, and when that soul departs, that's when death actually occurs.

41:46

And so people are probably wondering, was my uncle or my grandfather, whoever, were they dead when this happened?

41:52

And understandably, the next thought would likely be, I don't want anyone else to go through this.

41:59

What can we do legally? So that's my question to you. What can be done legally on either state or national level?

42:05

I don't know enough about this topic to put an end to this and to make it actually ethical.

42:10

Yeah, yeah, to kind of address what you were saying, though, I wanna show some mercy and compassion to all of us.

42:19

I mean, we've all been deceived. There has not been full transparency. So if you gave a beloved family member out of the goodness of your heart to become an organ donor, it's not your fault that you were not given these facts.

42:35

I mean, if you were a doctor or a nurse, and like me, I mean, you were indoctrinated into thinking and acting a certain way.

42:42

And honestly, doctors and nurses, we can't possibly research everything we're taught for ourselves.

42:50

The volume of knowledge is just too vast. But now as you begin to look into these things,

42:55

I mean, again, you were not told the facts. If you received an organ,

43:01

I mean, some of the most gut -wrenching emails I get are from people who received an organ and now feel that they're somehow culpable for that person's medical murder.

43:10

I mean, again, I want to offer you mercy. I want to offer you compassion. We have a God that is a forgiving

43:16

God. We need to repent of these things as individuals and as a nation.

43:22

But we also need to move forward and speak the truth in love and try to make these things right.

43:29

So yes, I'm very encouraged that our Health and Human Services Administration is looking into these things.

43:37

The Health Resources and Services Administration just did their own independent study because they asked the

43:45

Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network to evaluate some of these really horrific cases and nothing was being done.

43:53

So HRSA examined 351 cases where donation was authorized but wasn't able to be completed.

44:01

And what they found was alarming. They found 103 cases, that's 29 % that were concerning.

44:08

They found 73 patients, that's 21 % who had neurological signs incompatible with organ donation.

44:16

And they found 28 patients, that's 8 % who may not have been deceased at the time that organ procurement was initiated.

44:25

So this is coming out. We're going to have to deal with these facts and figures.

44:31

And that's why I was glad that the New York Times had their piece and that we're also having an investigation going on.

44:39

There's an investigation with the House Energy and Commerce Committee and they're taking a look at this.

44:46

They just met in late July as well. And they were reviewing things like the

44:52

Misty Hawkins case and others. And Congresswoman Kat Cammack from Florida had some really hard words for the past president of the

45:02

Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network saying, you know, this was on your watch. How come you're not doing anything about this?

45:08

And they're off now for the August recess but they're going to get back together in September and they're going to pursue this further.

45:17

Wow. So, I mean, I don't know what the end game of that is. So they investigate, which is good because we shine light on it.

45:25

What, I mean, do they, are they going to make organ donation at least the kind that happens after quote unquote brain death illegal?

45:35

I know you can't predict the future but is that the goal that you have? What would you like to see done? You know, at least what

45:41

I would like to see, you know I'd like to see that we could all opt out of brain death.

45:46

Right now, New Jersey is the only state that has a religious exemption to a brain death diagnosis.

45:54

So if you are in New Jersey or can get yourself transferred to New Jersey then you can only be declared dead under the circulatory respiratory standard if you have a religious objection.

46:06

This is what happened to Jahai McMath. If you remember her she was a little 13 year old girl in California who had a cardiac arrest after a tonsillectomy.

46:15

Her parents didn't believe she was dead because she was moving at times even though the hospital said she was brain dead they didn't buy it.

46:23

They were the help of Dr. Paul Byrne transferred her to New Jersey where she improved.

46:30

I mean, once they gave her proper care and treatment her brain function got better.

46:35

Two neurologists saw her and said she no longer meets criteria for brain death. She's minimally conscious.

46:41

She would follow commands. I mean, this, if you want to sort of a funny example this little 13 year old could correctly respond to Jahai which is the

46:50

FU finger and put up the correct digit. So this child was not dead. So again, we need to be able to opt out of a brain death diagnosis and get care.

47:02

Right now though, a lot of hospitals once they make that diagnosis you lose control of your loved one and they will remove life support over your objection.

47:12

So we need to be able to opt out. As I mentioned earlier, we need to be able to stop this two to five minute

47:19

DCD donation. When we know from the medical literature that people are still capable of resuscitation up to 10 minutes later.

47:27

I mean, that just has to stop. That's wrong. And I don't know if you have time for me to get into NRP donation.

47:34

You haven't talked about yet. Okay. So in the New York Times, some good, some bad the

47:40

New York Times also ran an op -ed recently by three transplant center affiliated doctors saying that we need a new expanded definition of death because we need more organs.

47:53

So they in fact want to do the opposite. They want to include more people as being legally dead.

48:00

And one of the things they would like to do is increase the use of an organ procurement technique that's going on right now called

48:07

NRP. And again, it's one of these multi -syllable words. It stands for normal thermic regional perfusion.

48:15

And what it is, it's a type of organ procurement that starts out like the DCD that we talked about earlier the donation after circulatory death the two to five minute wait period.

48:26

But then because the plan is to harvest that person's heart they want to restart that heart in the patient's chest to see if it's strong enough to be transplantable.

48:40

But if you restart the heart, well that just blows your legal definition of death under the

48:45

Uniform Determination of Death Act which requires the irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory function.

48:52

So how to get around that? Well, here's how they do it. They let the heart stop, do the two to five minute wait and then they start surgery by clamping off the circulation to the brain.

49:04

Now they've made you brain dead on purpose. So now you fall under the UDDA's neurologic standard of death.

49:12

So when they restart your heart in your own chest they're covered. So now they've met the legal definition that way.

49:19

So this is playing fast and loose with the dead donor rule and with the definitions of death under the

49:26

UDDA. But these New York Times op -ed writers want more of this sort of thing because we need the organ.

49:32

So again, this NRP is so questionable both ethically and legally that even the

49:40

American College of Physicians the world's largest specialty medical organization in the world called for a pause in NRP back in 2021 because they said the ethical and legal ramifications of this are so questionable, but no one's paying attention.

49:59

No pause has occurred. So again, people who would sign up for this?

50:04

If people were given in proper informed consent and knew what was happening behind the operating room doors if I told you we're gonna take your child and we're gonna take him to the operating room let his heart stop, clamp off the circulation to his brain and start his heart in his own chest who would consent to this?

50:23

So I want full transparency. I want accountability, transparency, informed consent.

50:30

As you're speaking, Dr. Kolasik I'm just wondering how evil are these people?

50:36

I understand as someone starting out your situation you described at the beginning,

50:41

I get it. You don't know what you're doing. You're listening to the people above you and it's not even quite as graphic as this but what you just described with this

50:50

NRP I don't understand how doctors can sleep on their pillow at night after doing that let alone if that's their job if that's what they're doing constantly.

51:02

It just seems to me that takes an evil person or you have to stuff your conscience or you don't have one working.

51:07

I don't know, maybe that's actual brain death when your conscience has stopped working.

51:14

I mean, obviously I'm being hyperbolic but I just can't believe people do this but then of course we have abortion doctors and the rest of maybe

51:21

I should but that's just unbelievable. I did not know about that and until I started reading what you had written on this and people can go find that at respectforhumanlife .com

51:35

surprising stuff, also surprising that not only is the New York Times doing good investigative work but you can go to New Jersey of all places for a safer

51:44

I wouldn't have expected that to be the state but I wish I could tell you it was the Christian church in New Jersey that had done that but it was the

51:52

Orthodox Jewish community God bless them that put that law into place and good for them.

52:00

Good for them. And they're doing the right thing. Yeah, and that makes sense. There's a high concentration of people of that persuasion in that state and I live in New York right now and so it's not that far.

52:11

So I guess I'm in luck if something like that happens in a way but man, well, how can people be involved because you might have some people in the audience that are thinking,

52:22

I wanna channel this into something whether it's donations, volunteering time petitioning a

52:28

Congress person, what do you suggest? You know,

52:33

I'm glad that we have our representatives looking into this but without public support

52:40

I don't think that they're gonna do much of anything honestly. So the biggest part of what I try to do is

52:46

I try to spread the information. I want people to be fully informed about all the things that are happening in those operating rooms when organ harvesting is taking place.

52:59

I think we should have fully informed consent about this. It's wrong that people are signing up at the

53:06

Department of Motor Vehicles with absolutely no information whatsoever for what might be the biggest medical decision of their lives.

53:16

How crazy is that? So I think we need to have fully informed consent full transparency.

53:22

I think we need to let our representatives know that we are not in favor of these practices which take life at the end of life.

53:32

It's not right to remove someone's life in order to save someone else's.

53:38

That doesn't add up to me. And I don't think it should add up to anyone who thinks about it for very long.

53:43

So again, we need to find better treatments for people with organ failure.

53:49

We could have had better treatments for people with neurologic injuries if we hadn't been writing them all off and making them organ donors for the last 60 years.

53:59

Think how much further along we could be right now if we hadn't been taking all the hard cases and giving up on them.

54:07

So I mean, it's not good medicine. It's not good science. It's not good ethics. So I think the biggest thing people need to do is educate your family and friends.

54:15

And that's why I have a website, respectforhumanlife .com. I've written a book, two books.

54:22

I've written a book called the Brain Death Fallacy. And that one is semi -technical. It has all the references if you want to look things up or give it to a doctor or a nurse.

54:31

Our first book I wrote with my friend Christopher Bogosh who's a nurse. That one is called

54:37

Harvesting Organs and Cherishing Life. And that one is just meant for the person in the pew next to you.

54:42

It's more simply written and easier to understand perhaps. So I don't think the Brain Death Fallacy is too bad.

54:48

On my YouTube channel, I have made a series of short videos. These are five to 10 minute videos about some of these techniques we've discussed today.

54:57

Things like brain death, donation after circulatory death, NRP, I'm going into things like what's a tissue donation and how is that ethical and what are the ethical caveats with that?

55:10

We've talked about a whole body donation. People have thought about donating a whole body to science.

55:16

And so those short videos are helpful as well. And if people want to kind of do the minute to minute on X, you would follow me at HeidiKlessigMD.

55:25

And I try to keep people up to date on what's the newest development on sort of a day -to -day basis there.

55:32

Well, I would recommend everyone, if you're on X, go follow Dr. Klessig on X and support the work at RespectForHumanLife .com,

55:41

get the books. Dr. Klessig, this was a really good interview. I really appreciate you explaining all of this for us in very simple terms too, so we can understand them.

55:51

I know it seems like it gets heady for some people, like let's let the experts take care of that because I don't understand the terminology, but you've made it very clear.

55:59

And murder, of course, is a very simple, clear -cut thing. So God bless you and your work and thank you once again.