Alive? Or Dead?

Nan Death, ,

I very recently came across this rather fascinating article and thought I’d share it with my readers.

Inside the Heated Scientific Debate to Redefine Who Is Dead

According to the article, in March of 2022, a virtual forum (Zoom) was held to re-write the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA), a draft law that has for four decades been the basis for defining who is alive and who is dead in the United States. It was a “crowded meeting of five dozen guests from both the legal and medical realms.”

At the beginning of the article was the following statement: Pandemonium can arise for laws that left up to states, each different state choosing to abide by its own wildly different set of rules. I had to smile as I read this because isn’t this exactly what we’re currently seeing as related to the Abortion issue? And, in fact, one of the participants said essentially the same thing:

“We’re literally legislating what states of life are worth protecting, which is very, very similar to the abortion debate.”
— Thaddeus Pope, Mitchell Hamline School of Law

Although the article includes some “chit-chat” related to the idiosyncrasies of a Zoom meeting, the essence of the discussion engendered several thoughts about … DEATH … and what it means.

I can understand that for legal reasons, it’s important to have a “standard” definition, but based on the various attendees to the meeting, that “standard” seemed a bit difficult to come by. And as I referenced above as related to different rules within the states, one of the participants argued that …

without a universal standard, death in the United States could become a legal and ethical hodgepodge, with different criteria in different states. That means someone could be alive in New York and dead in New Mexico.

Although it’s a long article, I found it rather fascinating and was curious to know what others thought about it. BTW, no formal decision was reached … and the new law’s wording isn’t expected to be agreed on before 2023.

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P.S. I tried to select the article as a stand-alone, but was unsuccessful so you will see coverage about other news events at the link. Hopefully, the article won’t disappear to make way for other newsworthy stories, but if it does … I made a copy 🙂 so let me know.

16 thoughts on “Alive? Or Dead?”

  2. My question is, who profits by such definitions. Especially im the US, where health care is a profitable enterprise, it could determine how long a living corpse is kept alive in a hospital, charging someone for keeping a body alive long after it should have been declared dead. Meanwnile, funeral homes are dying to get their hands on the body.
    Despite the fact I have a built-in defibrillator, I have a DNR if outside help is needed. Honestly, whatever happens to my body does not matter to me. If my spirit has left, I am gone. I am not my body.

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  3. I know this is serious stuff and I ought not be flippant, however, I had to giggle about being dead in one state but alive in another. I suppose one is dead when SCOTUS and the High Holy Roman Catholic Church say so.

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  4. Nan,

    Since it is a very, very long article and super in-depth discussion, I hope you happy to have long, in-depth comments on the subject, yes? 😁 I’ll assume your answer is a yes. 😉

    What struck me at first while reading the long article were the chronological debates of the still fluid definitions of life and/or death and the “ethics” of both. IOW, earlier definitions of those two words have too often MOVED between the 20th-century and 21st-century; or the 19th-century and the 21st-century and so on. Some past debates even imply the widely varied authorship-eras of the Hebrew Bible thru the lens of the 2nd- and 3rd-century CE New Testament and their theological ethics against 21st-century medical ethics. I always find that hilariously ludicrous!

    Finally, by 1980—the late 20th-century btw—the American Bar Association, the American Academy of Neurology, and the American Medical Association, all gathered in Chicago, IL, and defined rather precisely exactly WHAT TWO things accurately represent death, and by default life:

    An individual who has sustained either (1) irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions, or (2) irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem… A determination of death must be made in accordance with accepted medical standards.
    — The Uniform Determination of Death Act

    But that was 1980 wasn’t it? Hahaha.

    Robert Truog, the director of Harvard’s Center for Bioethics chimes in to the Zoom debate saying “Human beings do not need a brain to live.” BOOM! Very true. As a typical penny-a-dozen, descended Neanderthal heterosexual male, all sectors of society, particularly the female gender over many many centuries, have known full well that due to certain stimulants our hetero male blood-flow goes in only one of two directions at any given point in time and specific events. IOW’s, we Neanderthal males become quickly brain-dead when every bit of our blood leaves the cranium and engorges our crotches! It’s a well known social fact, right? 😉

    Nevertheless, with that statement Dr. Truog is moving the debate from Life or Death to another different debate: “What is a quality life of living?” Talk about opening up Pandora’s Box! Then he did it. Dr. Truog went there… as we all know SO MANY superstitious people want to go. Pffft…

    But, Truog said, the question of when someone has died is more a metaphysical one than it is a scientific one.

    We all know what is implied by the vague, broad, obtuse, generic word: metaphysical. Now we are fluidly going back-n-forth freely between ancient superstitions of say the 5th- and 4th-centuries BCE, all the way thru and up to the 21st-century CE. WOW! WOAH! 😯 Does anyone else see the major antichronistic and ludicrous nature of doing that!? I mean, we are grossly over-valuating civilizations, socioreligious, and sociocultural groups who once truly believed our solar system and Universe was a geocentric model, or that the Earth was flat! Hello!? Even the word metaphysics didn’t exist in those millenia anywhere on Earth. Then Dr. Truog falls into his own illogical, antichronistic trap he himself setup:

    Truog argues that, had it not been for the advent of vital organ transplantation, brain death as a concept likely would never have been invented.

    But it DID happen. It is not an alternative parallel Universe or time-line. It’s historical fact Dr. Truog. You are trying to change or (in theory only) rewrite history. Again, an antichronistic fallacy that even parts of modern 21st-century society are horribly gullible to embrace, e.g. our current Originalists regarding the 18th-century U.S. Constitution. Dr. Sam Shemie of the Montreal Children’s Hospital later reeled in Dr. Truog’s valid Pandora’s Box, but flawed tangent on “Life or Death.” Bravo to him.

    Therefore, for me personally and those who also think and reasonably believe in medical science’s perpetual advancements throughout time and decades, there is no end to the unanswerable rabbit-trails and holes when the question of Life or Death ventures aimlessly into “metaphysics” or the never-ending Faith-systems or their gazillion theologies around the globe. That, to me, is insanity and misses the boat completely! 🙄

    I’m with Mr. Alex Capron on this debate. And regarding abortions, it is totally left up to the mother—since to this DAY (in utter bafflement!) no one seems to care to equally bring in the effin MALE’S dick to the decisions and facts of unplanned or illegal conceptions (why is beyond me!) 😡 —and for decades medical science and embryology have known consistently that brain activity in a fetus begins around 6-weeks or 40-43 days after conception.

    So, based on that solid medical fact and the 1980 UDDA, that fetus is a living human after 40-43 days. Pretty clear-cut to me.

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  5. Nan’s point is made and underscored: if we allow laws that pertain to all society to be in the hands of individual states, we will never have stability in our legal system. I also think that’s the intention.

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  6. I have not yet read the original article, but the discussion here has inspired some thoughts about both physical Life and physical Death. For at least 70 of my 77 years, I have been aware of continuous and accelerating changes in both frtal viability and extended lifespan. Providing human stupidity or some other force of nature doesn’t create (what for us would be) a mass extinction event, the time will come when a fertilized egg can be brought to viability in an artificial womb. Pro-Life and Pro-Choice will no longer require the death of anyone. Similarly, as we advance medicine and merge with our technology, life expectancy will increase dramatically. How many prosthetics must one accumulate before losing one’s humanity?

    It’s likely that the reevaluation of the boundaries of both Life and Death will continue for a very long time … and eventually, become irrelevant.

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  7. When they can 3D print all organs that are better, then this problem will subside. But then comes the right to die or dignity with death efforts. I want a DNR, no feeding tubes, no ventilator …
    If the involuntary system and not machines is still working to let breathing continue, but no heartbeat, that is not belong alive. If the heart was somehow still beating also on its own, but the brain shows no activity for a sufficient period of time..a week or so, that is not being alive. It’s just your body functioning on its own in some way, but you are gone finished caput. Beware…hospitals, nursing homes, big pharma, religion and other devious ways to make money off keeping you “alive ” will have their input on this.

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  8. There is a cult….errr a “church” ( because it has thousands of members….and a university offering such courses as “supernatural ministry”) in a city north of me (Redding) where one of the many sub ministers or assistant pastors or whatever sadly lost an infant child. They kept the sad baby’s corpse for two weeks because doesn’t Saint Paul claim Jesus’ ministers have power over life and death itself? This was in 2021, not 1357.

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  9. I probably wouldn’t have such a problem with religion if they just stuck to worrying about what happens after you’re dead, something I have no interest in. It’s the interfering with my life, stuffing stupid stuff down my throat that’s the problem. I’m pretty harsh with subscribers to such nonsense and I’m not necessarily sorry about it. Maybe I’ll shock one into waking up and smelling brimstone, but I don’t really care.

    An Old Chinese Guy supposedly once said “before seeking revenge dig two graves,” but that’s not where I heard it. Don’t be beating people up unless they’re trying to beat you up. Not easy, even after all these years, to choke back the resentments, for lack of a better word, of the harm that was done to me and not desire or seek out revenge. I have no fear of Death … I grew up in Hell.

    But enough about me, the bigger issue is these people are destroying the world, they are deliberately destroying the thin layer of no longer potentially toxic gasses we live in enveloping the only ball of mud we know of we can live on in the name of some nutball cult of world domination, and we really need to do something about that. They are committing a genocide on the rest of the world. The ends justify the means.

    If I die fighting the good fight I’ll go to Valhalla, drink mead and consort with like-minded women …

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    • Again, I need to point out this post is NOT about religion or its relationship to death. It’s about the contents of the referenced article, which included a meeting of various legal and medical representatives to define “who is alive and who is dead in the United States.”

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