Sandra Gandarez
Neurobiology and Behavior
February 24, 2009
It is a moral obligation of hospitals protocol and physicians to remove a "brain-dead" individual from life support since they are already technically dead.
Before discussing the moral issues some basic information and view points are necessary to understand certain stances. Brain death is defined in several articles as the complete and irreversible loss of brain stem function. In brain death, all the brain stem functions, including those that maintain breathing, stop working. (1, 2) There is an absence of blood flow to the entire brain which in turn causes the deprivation that enables brain death. (3)