Brain death and brain-stem death: useful fiction with a purpose

After having read the work of Fr. Norkowski ¿Brain death and brain-stem death: useful fiction with a purpose.¿ am impressed with the thoroughness of his extensive background research, the depth, and correctness of his medical science, and the soundness of his logic. He presents the conflicting sides of the various controversies with fairness and objectivity, and his own conclusions are well reasoned. The criterion for death remains an open topic in the Church. Pope John Paul II, in his 2000 address to the Transplantation Society, based on the medical information available to him at the time, declared that ¿the criterion adopted in more recent times for ascertaining the fact of death, namely the complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity, if rigorously applied, does not seem to conflict with the essential elements of a sound anthropology.¿ His words ¿does not seem to conflict¿ were clearly carefully chosen so as to avoid creating an impression of a dogmatic assertion of the neurological criterion; on the contrary, they imply an openness to the possibility that further medical information might call for a re-evaluation of the neurological criterion. · D. Alan Shewmon