The nagging issue is whether a warm, pink, pulsating, live-looking body can or should be called dead. All of the organs are viable. The body could go through the onset of puberty, it could gestate an infant. There are such cases on record. What the Beecher Committee accomplished was to find a good reason not to utilize resources on people who would unquestionably die without ever regaining consciousness. Being able to change their classification and call them dead had virtue for society. They said, in effect, “It’s not living if your brain is irrevocably gone; it’s not living, so you can go
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