Can a Ventilator Mask Death?

"One of the most frequent arguments made by ‘brain death’ defenders is that the body of a ‘brain-dead’ individual is not a body but a corpse, even when it may seem alive because a ventilator masks its death.”

Dr. Doyen Nguyen, OP, MD, STD, and author of The New Definitions of Death for Organ Donation: A Multidisciplinary Analysis from the Perspective of Christian Ethics explains why this idea is false:

1. The ventilator can only push oxygenated air into the lungs.

A machine cannot cause the body to absorb this oxygen into the bloodstream, or cause the oxygen to cross the cell membrane into the body's innumerable cells and tissues. A machine cannot cause the cellular metabolism of this oxygen into useful materials for the cell, or yield carbon dioxide for the patient to exhale. Only a LIVING organism can do these things.

2. Connecting a ventilator to a cadaver does not cause it to look alive.

If a ventilator could cause the appearance of life, logically then, if we connected a ventilator to the corpse of a person whose death was determined by the traditional criteria, we would expect the ventilator to cause what it is alleged to be capable of: to give the appearance of life in a dead entity. This does not happen however.

3. Moreover, why do people only use this argument — that ventilators mask death — in the context of brain death?

There are many comatose, critically ill people on ventilators in ICUs, but no one ever says that people with severe infections or multiple organ failure are actually dead, and that their ventilators are fooling doctors and nurses into thinking they are alive.

Severely neurologically injured people labeled “brain dead” look alive because they ARE alive. Technology can only sustain life, not produce it.

Nguyen D. Pope John Paul II and the Neurological Standard for the Determination of Death: A Critical Analysis of his Address to the Transplantation Society. The Linacre Quarterly. 2017;84(2):155-186. doi:10.1080/00243639.2017.1307502