Brain Death and ORGAN HARVESTING： What You NEED to Know
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Summary
Dr. Paul Byrne is a neonatologist who has devoted most of his life to fighting the false definition of death that has led to an industry of organ donation around the world. Dr. Byrne went from a career of working with the tiniest babies who are delivered early, and then got into this other area which has consumed so much of his career.
Transcript
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So my golden objective is to educate the people about the Determination of Death Act,
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which is a bad law, which is based on bad medicine, which is contrary to the truth.
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The problem of today's culture is that euthanasia is rampant. We never thought we'd get there,
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but it is. One of the ways we got there, believe it or not, is this whole concept of brain death.
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Many paramedics, my daughter for one, would talk about what is a motorcycle accident or a motorcycle
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rider. They're a potential organ donor. It's like a joke that is said. But the whole issue of brain
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death is very interesting because it's actually not real death. If that startles you, wait till you
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hear from our next guest. He's a quite well-known neonatologist who has devoted now most of his
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life to fighting brain death, the false definition of death that has led to an industry of organ
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donation around the world. You're going to want to stay tuned to this episode of the John Henry
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Now let's begin as we always do with the sign of the cross. In the name of the Father, and of the Son,
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and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. So Dr. Byrne, you went from a career, a beautiful career, of working with
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the tiniest babies who are delivered early, and you've saved so many lives that way, and then got into this
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other area, which has sort of consumed so much of your life. How did that happen? Give us some of that
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story. Well, first of all, to start with the part of it about neonatology, I started a special care
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nursery at Glennon Children's Hospital in St. Louis in 1963, when in fact, every baby less than 1500 grams,
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that's three pounds and four ounces, that had trouble with breathing, and many babies larger than that
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had trouble with breathing, died. It was 100% mortality. In fact, the matter is, at that particular
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time, President Kennedy's baby, who was about five pounds, died. So there was no treatment. So we
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started in 63. I would say we really did not start to make advance until about 1970. Then what happened
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in my own life, you know, we were at Cardinal Lantern Hospital. We were instrumental in developing
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ways to help babies breathe. We identified the need for magnesium and zinc and copper and nutrition,
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that kind of thing. And then a patient by the name of Joseph in 1975 was born prematurely and on a
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ventilator. And Joseph, well, wouldn't move, wouldn't respond. And one of the doctors on our team said,
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let's do a brainwave test. So we did the brainwave test, and it was interpreted as consistent with cerebral
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death. And so I saw death on the report, and I looked at Joseph, and I said, well, he's not dead.
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I called the neurologist. He said, well, repeat it, which we did in 48 hours, and it was unchanged.
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So I said, what do we do now? And he said, well, in some places, they turn off ventilators. I said,
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well, I don't do that. I said, I treat patients. Some live, some die, but I just treat them. So I
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continued to treat Joseph. He did get off the ventilator. He didn't go to school. He got excellent
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grades in school. Eventually, he buried his three children. Because of Joseph, and I have to tell
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you, I think it took me several months till about that time Joseph was getting to be five or six
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months old. He continued to live, and I said, I better investigate this. So I started my investigation
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then, and what became clear is that brain death is not based on any kind of science. The science,
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as you know, is really discovering, for the most part, what God has done. But the scientists
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make some observation or postulation, and then does more testing to verify it goes from there.
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Well, the first, to put it in perspective, what occurred was, to lead up to the lack of science,
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what occurred was they did a heart transplant in South Africa in December the 1st, 1967,
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and Christian Bernard, and that became commonly known. But what has not become common knowledge
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is three days later, they did a heart transplant in Brooklyn, New York. They cut the beating heart
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out of a three-day-old baby who had a problem with the brain and transplanted it into an 18-day-old
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baby who had a problem with the heart. The end of their procedures, both babies were dead. It was
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illegal. It was immemorial. And so to resolve this, they set up a committee at Harvard. In about
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six months, the Harvard committee reported it, and their title of the report is A Definition of
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Irreversible Coma. Now, you can't be dead and in coma, no matter how you modify it. And so looking at
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that, a new way of declaring somebody dead, looking at that, how did they get there? Well,
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the way we make advances in medicine, sometimes they begin in the laboratory. Sometimes they begin
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with experimentation on dogs or cats or rats. Brain death was invented without any kind of
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laboratory data, no basic science. In fact, to the matter, there was no patient data. It has only one
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reference to the article, and that reference was to Popeius XII. They quoted him out of context,
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but they omitted the quote from Popeius XII, which is very significant. Popeius XII said,
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we are to presume that human life continues as long as vital functions are present, even when
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supported by artificial means. It goes from there to the next article known as the Minnesota Criteria,
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studied only nine patients, did brain-wave testing on only nine patients. Two of the nine still had
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evidence of brain waves. And fact of the matter is, if you use the current gain that's required,
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four of the patients would have had brain-wave activity. But their conclusion was that it's no
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longer required to do EEG or brain-wave testing, and it was stricken from that. The largest study in the
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literature, known as the collaborative study, 503 patients. Well, what happened to those 503?
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44 of them did not die. And then of those who did die, they were just focusing on the brain,
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10% had no pathology in the brain. And it goes from there. It is no science behind brain death. But
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more importantly, John Henry, is while we focus on these issues, the most important issues have to do
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with the difference between life and death. And we may know what life is. You're a living person,
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I'm a living person. We can look at another person and know that that life is there. Well, that life
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begins with creation. And the love that God has for us, and in the love between husband and wife,
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there is a time when the person does not exist, and now the person exists. That's creation. And we can
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know that that life has begun at conception. And then that life is a continuum until death. And death
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is the event that separates life from death. So we know what life is. We know that death is something
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different. And so the focus ought to be on not declaring someone dead until they are in fact dead.
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And so what happens when the life separates from the body, we can focus on the cell, the basic unit of
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biology is cell, but it helps us to think that the life of the person is in the whole person. Yes,
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it's in every cell too. But what happens is, and it happens in all living cells, what happens when the
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life leaves, then the enzymes are activated and they're within the cell itself to destruct autolysis.
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Auto meaning self, lysis meaning disruption of the membrane. So autolysis. So it begins when the life
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ends. We know that. And so far as the determination of death is concerned, cells, tissues are important.
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But what we should be doing is not declaring somebody dead until they are dead. What there is during life,
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there is a system of respiration, a system of circulation, and there is a nervous system to focus
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on the brain. So you see, during life, there's an interdependence of circulation, respiration, and the
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activities of the brain. So it's an interdependent functioning that maintains the physical unity,
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of the body, but it's only there because of the unity of the body and the soul. So at death, the soul
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separates, and what we're left with on Earth are the remains. And that remains is manifest as
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destruction, disintegration. The first part is autolysis. As it continues on, there's further
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disintegration, decomposition, eventually decay. If we want to wait until the muscles show that
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destruction, we can wait until there is destruction in the muscles, and that's called rigor mortis,
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which occurs about three hours after there's no circulation. Now, we don't have to wait that long
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to call somebody dead, but we certainly should not be calling somebody dead who has circulation,
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respiration, normal color, digest food, get fever if they get sick, put out urine. And fact of the
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matter is, what I've just described is what brain death is a life. And fact of the matter is, when they
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caught on them to take the organs, in 10 out of 10 patients studied at Johns Hopkins University,
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the heart rate went up and the blood pressure went up. That would not happen a cadaver. So brain death is
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that kind of thing. John Henry, in the society in which we live, in many ways, we tend to be a
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trusting society. In recent times, because of other things that happened, COVID and the like, we've
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learned not to be quite so trusting, but we tend to be trusting in society. And so the general public,
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I think, trusts they want to do good to help their fellow man. They think, well, if I'm dead, take my
00:12:02.580
organs and all of that kind of stuff. But they have to get to the facts. And the fact of the matter is,
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God creates us. God creates each one of us as unique and unrepeatable and gives our organs to us.
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And God makes it so that we cannot transplant an organ to another person. Well, human beings have found
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a way to interfere with God, to interfere with God's natural way of rejecting one another's organs,
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interfering with that so organs can be transplanted. And it is, but it isn't that God didn't know how to
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interfere with the rejection process. He does it every time a mother is pregnant. The baby is foreign to her
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and she would reject it. So as soon as the mother gets pregnant, rejection process is interfered with,
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and it can be documented. It's been documented in multiple animals and human beings that already,
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when there's just one cell, that's even before implantation, the early pregnancy factor is there,
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and that interferes with the immune mechanisms. The mother accepts that baby and her immune mechanisms
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are interfered with until she delivers. And as soon as she delivers, her immune mechanisms are
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back like they were otherwise. So God knew how to interfere with and knows how to interfere with the
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immune mechanism, but he doesn't. So human beings come along and find a way to do this. So our organs
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are created for our own self. Can they be, if you take something like a heart, every time a heart
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transplant is done, the surgeon opens the chest, the wide open, ties off or puts the blood vessels in
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such shape that they can go to someone else all along. And I show recordings of this sometimes when
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I give a talk, shows the beating heart with the chest open up. The transplant surgeon then stops the
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beating heart and then lifts it out. So that heart, that person is very much alive when they
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wheel them into the operating room to cut their, get their heart. And what's left are the remains
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of someone after they take the heart and many other vital organs to transplant to someone else.
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Okay. So what you said that that's a lot to take in. There's some really, really fascinating things.
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One of the things that probably many people don't know is that whenever you get an organ
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transplant, you have to, for the rest of your life, take anti-rejection drugs because the body
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fights the foreign entity, someone else's organ and doesn't allow for that. Otherwise the body
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would fight it and destroy it as a foreign entity, but doesn't because of these anti-rejection drugs.
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And then Dr. Byrne explained how in the case of new life of conception, also a new life, a different
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life, a different body, but God makes it so that there's no rejection going on there. Because as Dr.
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Byrne said, God is able to account for making this a different entity inside a body and having it not
00:15:13.740
go naturally. Now we've figured out a way to do this with anti-rejection drugs. I have so many things
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to ask you about. There's so many fascinating aspects of this, but one is that these anti-rejection
00:15:22.980
drugs are very costly. There's very much a cost incentive in this whole organ donation business.
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We're going to get to the morality in a second, but the cost incentive is really there, both in terms
00:15:35.340
of the transplant itself and in terms of the anti-rejection drugs, which go on forever. Is
00:15:41.000
there not? If you can tell us about that. Actually what happens in organ transplant, the recipient of
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the organ exchanges one set of problems for another set of problems, which is different from what we're
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used to in surgery. If someone has abdominal pain and appendicitis, they get an operation and everything
00:15:59.480
is great. It isn't that way. And yes, these things are important to understand about the
00:16:07.060
rejection and anti-rejection drugs and things that the person who receives the organs through for the
00:16:13.580
rest of their life. And it's important to identify with that. Also has an effect on all of us because,
00:16:22.220
for instance, TB is more common than it used to be. And things happen that are in society that are
00:16:28.900
interfering with the fighting of infection and those kinds of things. It's a societal issue.
00:16:34.800
Kidney transplant is another one that gets a lot of attention, but we do have a way to treat kidney
00:16:41.640
failure with dialysis, but people can live for a long time. And what happens, John Henry, is that
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oftentimes human beings will take the easier way out as opposed to the moral way. If we just focus on the
00:16:57.280
heart, for instance, while heart transplant, as we've already described, some of it is involved
00:17:02.580
there, almost as sure as you and I are talking to each other, a heart would have already, artificial
00:17:08.560
heart that would have already been developed. It's been developed, used in animals and that kind of
00:17:14.300
thing. It functions very well. We'd very likely, we'd have a heart if we hadn't given doctors a way to
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find the easy way, that is, get the organ from someone else who's alive. And yes, they get killed
00:17:27.480
in the process, but that gets acceptable to some. Incidentally, it's a multi-billion dollar industry.
00:17:34.260
Forty-eight billion dollars in 2020 was billed for organ transplants, of which doctors got six
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billion dollars. And so many doctors, essentially all of the hospitals are involved in this and it's
00:17:48.720
organized by the federal government. But when it's like a lot of other things that are organized by
00:17:54.560
the federal government or organized by anybody, it gets down to the individual persons and people that
00:18:01.640
are participating. They know that when they cut on them, sometimes they have to give them a paralyzing
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agent so they don't move. They have to give them anesthetics so that the care of the patient,
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the one they're taking the organs from is better. And John Henry, it's so sad because patients that
00:18:22.420
are deficient in thyroid, like the little girl, 11 years old in California that we're helping with
00:18:28.240
now, deficient in thyroid. And her mother, her father, we begged for them to give her thyroid.
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She was deficient in thyroid. A lot of people know that thyroid's essential for living. She was
00:18:41.280
deficient in thyroid. It took us more than a week to get them to give her a thyroid. If her parents
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would have said, yes, take her organs, she would have gotten thyroid immediately because they give
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the thyroid to make their organs in better shape for the one they're going to give the organs to.
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And so many of these things, I suspect if ordinary people would know about them, perhaps they would
00:19:05.080
think differently. I don't know what you're doing in terms of sharing this information as
00:19:11.180
you are now in many other ways. It helps to educate the people in terms of what's going on.
00:19:17.340
One of the things you said there, the fascinating aspect of the huge amount of money involved and
00:19:25.140
the government's work within this sphere has, at least I can speak to Canada and America, has created
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teams of, you can call it sales agents for this. When someone is involved in an accident,
00:19:38.420
particularly a young, healthiest person in a car or motorcycle accident, the family is like
00:19:44.380
preyed upon by these professional salespeople who are trying to get them to sign a consent so that
00:19:52.160
they can quickly garner the organs. Because this is sort of like a business. It's sold psychologically
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by telling the parents, well, no, you lost your son or you lost your daughter, but at least they can make
00:20:02.040
contribution to the future and so on and so forth. And yet this is immoral. And they are
00:20:08.060
signing the death warrants of their own children. One of the things I want to talk about, because I
00:20:13.120
know this is something that people think of, they think to themselves, wow, but it's possible.
00:20:18.640
You know how incredible it is that you can take someone's heart and put it into somebody else
00:20:23.120
and connect all this. It's like a miracle. Isn't that then moral? Because the miracle of being able
00:20:31.360
Well, of course, that sounds good. But when somebody is a cadaver, it isn't so. There's
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no organs that you can transplant from a cadaver. And you don't need to be too astute observer to
00:20:45.080
know what happens when there is death. Obviously, anybody who's around or a person who has died or
00:20:53.020
their pet or they find a dead bird in the woods as they walk, it's clearly different. That difference
00:21:00.460
happens when the soul separates. And then immediately the destruction begins. It's
00:21:07.060
called autolysis. And no one should be declared dead unless there is destruction of the major vital
00:21:13.740
systems, the circulatory and respiratory system in the brain. No one should be declared dead unless
00:21:20.000
there's destruction of those systems. What do they do in brain death? The law revolves around an
00:21:28.440
absence of function. And so it revolves around activity. If you don't have activity, then you're
00:21:37.160
called dead like the little girl in California. Unless 11 years old goes into diabetes and coma and
00:21:44.160
the result of that, immediately they start focusing on calling her brain dead, but they can't do the
00:21:51.180
formal test. They do the formal test and, and she doesn't take a breath. You know, the formal test of
00:21:57.820
taking away the ventilator called the apnea test. She doesn't breathe. They write on her chart that she's
00:22:03.800
brain dead, but then they want to do another test. The mother, the father, plead, beg, we do everything to keep
00:22:10.600
them from doing the second one because they, the apnea test is a terrible, terrible test. They take away the
00:22:16.200
ventilator for up to 10 minutes and the patient must show they can take a breath or that becomes the
00:22:22.600
signal to cut out the beating heart. That little girl, they did the second one in spite of pleading
00:22:28.980
not to do it. And she took a breath. She was called brain dead the first time, not, could not call her
00:22:35.780
brain dead the second time because she took a breath. And here we are two weeks later and going to go to
00:22:41.920
court tomorrow. And the doctors in the hospital are wanting to do another one of these apnea tests.
00:22:49.380
And this little, little girl shows much evidence of healing about what happens is that once somebody
00:22:57.400
has this declaration of brain death, the system is going to make them dead because everybody who's
00:23:03.020
called brain dead, the system makes them dead either by cutting out their vital organs, or if they can't
00:23:10.300
breathe on their own, taking their life support away from them. That's why they say nobody's recovered
00:23:16.140
from brain death. Nobody's going to get recovered when they have their beating heart cut out. They cut
00:23:21.440
out the organs and they always are dead if they need their life support and take it away. It's so sad
00:23:28.400
because on the surface, they pretend like they really want to do something, but underneath, there's all
00:23:35.300
these things. John Henry, you mentioned about people in Canada hovering over to get the organs. In the
00:23:41.480
United States, we have that, except we give them a nice name. We call them a designated requester. So
00:23:48.920
the treating physician is not allowed to discuss organ transplants. The designated requester, who is often
00:23:56.780
described as somebody who is dressed very nice, has a lot of charisma, gets a cup of coffee,
00:24:02.400
befriends somebody in the family, and eventually gets them to say yes. And then, John Henry, I work
00:24:09.560
with people all over the world. I say all over many, many places in the world. That includes Canada and
00:24:16.160
includes England. More than once, someone has said, well, you have it so nice in the United States because
00:24:23.620
we in Canada or we in England have socialized medicine. In the United States, at least in my opinion,
00:24:31.140
we have socialized medicine also. In Canada, there's one pool of money. In the United States,
00:24:36.880
there's three pools of money. The federal money, the state money, and then the private insurance
00:24:42.420
company. All of the private insurance companies do exactly what the federal government says to do.
00:24:48.680
So it's a form of socialized medicine. There's a little bit of input into it, but not really.
00:24:54.740
This morning, I go to physical therapy. It will stop pretty soon, no matter what, because there's
00:25:01.000
a certain number of visits. No, it doesn't revolve. It's a similar kind of thing, but it's not quite so
00:25:11.800
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One of the counters I've heard to the argument for why, because this is so miraculous, isn't it good
00:26:18.160
because doctors are able to do this thing? Isn't it moral because they're able to? It's been compared
00:26:24.880
to me before to in vitro fertilization. Seems miraculous, seems like you have life in conception
00:26:30.880
where there couldn't be. And yet it is, while being a fantastical type of thing, is completely
00:26:38.380
immoral. It's outside of God's plan for procreation. And so similarly, even though it does seem rather
00:26:45.500
miraculous what they can do, what science has advanced to, what physicians can do, surgeons can
00:26:51.280
do, it's still immoral. This is not real death. It's brain death, a category created so that they
00:26:57.900
could do these things. You know, even though it's quote-unquote helping people, where some people
00:27:03.260
get help, they are helped, but also they have to take these anti-rejection drugs, which costs a lot.
00:27:07.980
But imagine too, I mean, you can help poor people by stealing from other people, robbing them or
00:27:14.140
whatever, but that doesn't make it right either. So the morality here is not a case of morality
00:27:20.560
because you can do this seemingly wonderful thing. That doesn't make it moral. Let's talk for a little
00:27:26.040
bit about what happens with brain death. And after the fact, we've had these designations where people
00:27:34.660
have been on the list to go for brain death, but then woken up out of their designation, but prior to
00:27:42.520
extraction surgery, which would have killed them for sure.
00:27:45.260
Well, that's been around for a long time, John Henry. A couple of things early on when I started
00:27:51.000
to investigate, there was a patient who had flat brain waves for 39 days and then woke up. In
00:28:00.140
Madison, Wisconsin, there was a man, Mr. Winogron, who was declared brain dead. And as they started to
00:28:07.260
do something to take his eyes, he blinked. And so there were always from the beginning, it's that way.
00:28:15.260
But, you know, the doctors who declare death, they said, well, they're always dead when they do it.
00:28:21.940
Well, we have a few examples of what happens. An outstanding example is Jahi McMath, a lot of
00:28:29.700
notoriety, a 13-year-old girl in California who had tonsil surgery and then was said to be brain
00:28:36.960
dead. And her mother got on the TV. It's actually in the same room where I'm sitting now. Her mother
00:28:43.360
was on the TV and pleaded, well, is there anyone out there that will help him? My son was right next
00:28:48.500
to me and he poked me and said, well, dad, what are you going to do? So I went to California and they
00:28:53.520
wouldn't let any doctors in to see her. So the way I got in was about two o'clock in the morning and
00:29:00.000
her stepfather, with guard in between, her stepfather said, oh, pastor, come on in here. That's how I
00:29:06.780
get in to see her. They wouldn't call her by name. They referred to her as a dead body. They gave her
00:29:13.340
no nutrition for a month, no nutrition. And so we got involved and she was deficient in thyroid and
00:29:21.360
we found a way to give her that and get her started on that while she was still in California
00:29:28.120
to get out of that hospital. Incidentally, she had a death certificate in California.
00:29:33.740
She had all the tests for brain deaths. She had three treating physicians who said she was
00:29:39.780
brain dead. The court appointed another expert from Stanford who came along and confirmed that
00:29:46.320
she was brain dead. They got her transferred to New Jersey where they gave her treatment that she
00:29:52.880
needed. In a few months, she was transferred out to an apartment where her family took care of her.
00:29:59.420
New Jersey, I went to see her and her mother would say, give me a thumbs up. And after a little bit,
00:30:06.740
her thumb would come up, raise your left leg. And the same thing would happen. So while she was
00:30:12.020
declared brain dead because of God and her mother and a few other people, she wasn't killed. As currently
00:30:20.920
happens in people who were called brain dead, they're all alive. Their life gets ended. And if it's
00:30:27.280
purposely ended by cutting out their vital organs, that's serious, serious matter. If it's a question
00:30:34.180
about whether the treatment is extraordinary means and the obligation to do it, that's another question.
00:30:40.760
But if they do need the ventilator, as Jahai McMath did need the ventilator, she did. Anybody,
00:30:48.820
incidentally, anybody who's on a ventilator for about two, maybe three weeks and has an endotracheal tube,
00:30:55.300
that they cannot get out of an ICU unless they get a tracheostomy. The girl in California,
00:31:02.820
she needs a tracheostomy, but they won't do it. A tracheostomy is to put a tube through the throat.
00:31:09.220
So instead of the long tube that goes through the mouth, it's a short tube. And it makes it much
00:31:15.280
easier for the patient to breathe through the one through the neck. And in a Lou in Nevada,
00:31:21.400
which incidentally, her case went to the Supreme Court in Nevada. We got a 7-0 unanimous ruling that
00:31:29.320
the court could not accept what they were calling as brain dead and sent it back to a lower court.
00:31:36.540
But in that case, no doctor at that hospital in Nevada would do tracheostomy. Another doctor in
00:31:43.720
Nevada would come and do it, but the hospital wouldn't allow them to do it. Treating the air,
00:31:49.620
nose and throat doctor who was capable of doing it, on the phone, he was practically in tears with me
00:31:56.140
saying, I want to do it, but I can't take the pressure from my peaters. And so it's a whole
00:32:03.660
team of people that are all participating in this multi-billion dollar industry, which depends on
00:32:11.880
getting healthy organs, not damaged organs. So healthy organs, where do you get healthy organs
00:32:18.200
from living persons? Can you get a healthy organ from a cadaver? No. What's truly stunning is the
00:32:24.820
Chinese have this huge market in organs because they're able to do so with their prisoners that
00:32:30.680
they conveniently can get them to donate their organs very freely. Here, it seems in America and Canada
00:32:38.340
in Europe, they've had to develop all these psychological means. You put the whole country
00:32:43.340
under a scientific and moral and basically propaganda to be able to engage in this industry,
00:32:49.820
this multi-billion dollar industry. Absolutely stunning. But this has personal implications
00:32:54.000
for people because one of the things that they're confronted with, the first and foremost,
00:32:59.600
is for most people on their driver's licenses, when they get their driver's license,
00:33:03.380
they're asked to sign consent for organ donation. How's that going today?
00:33:07.900
I want to be an organ donor and they don't give them any information. That doesn't spur of the moment.
00:33:13.000
And I really think that people feel like, well, if I'm dead, take my organs, that kind of thing.
00:33:20.660
And so they say yes to that. But signing that organ donor permit at the license bureau,
00:33:26.920
that gives license to the transplant surgeon to kill you. No one should be saying yes at the
00:33:33.020
license bureau. Everyone should be saying no. At least gather some information before you do that.
00:33:39.700
In medicine, the distributing of information and giving information enough to make a decision,
00:33:46.120
we call that informed consent. And so a person has to have information in order to consent or
00:33:54.200
decline. At the license bureau, they're not giving any information. And whether they consent or decline,
00:34:00.660
they're doing it without information. Information is important, like education, John Henry. But in
00:34:07.460
order for me to educate, I am dependent on people like you to disseminate the information. There are
00:34:16.480
other organizations that are very active, even organizations that have, as far as people know,
00:34:24.060
good reputations that have been supportive of brain death and organ transplants,
00:34:29.440
still supportive of it. And so it's the law is such that it's not a good law, can be declared dead when
00:34:38.380
you're alive. But you see, the law is there. The law is dependent on the findings of medicine. We call
00:34:47.280
that criteria to make a judgment. But the law in the medicine ought not to contradict the philosophy,
00:34:56.580
the philosophy of living things has to do with the soul. And the human person, there is a unity of the body and
00:35:07.460
the soul. The soul has powers, of which obviously the intellective power is a major part. But there is still the
00:35:17.360
nutritive power as there is. These people digest their food, the locomotive, they have circulation.
00:35:24.260
These are powers of the soul. These are powers of being alive. So all of these people that are called
00:35:31.120
brain dead, it's contrary to science to call them dead. It's contrary to philosophy to call them dead.
00:35:38.880
But it's intertwined. And John Henry to think about them. It's like a lot of other things. And like, if in order to
00:35:48.000
think about them, us human beings, because we tend to think about one thing at a time, we have to separate
00:35:56.580
them out. But while we're separating them out, we get them mixed up. And so we mix up the philosophy, the law, the medicine,
00:36:06.940
the tests that are done, they get mixed up. And then in some ways, we have some feelings or emotions,
00:36:14.860
say, I want to help somebody else. And yet some other way, we know that you're not dead when the
00:36:20.760
heart's beating in their circulation. And then the philosophy gets there. And then we human beings,
00:36:28.420
sometimes we give in when we shouldn't. And so what does the general public rely on? The general public
00:36:35.320
relies on the leadership of the doctors, the leadership of the law, the leadership of the
00:36:43.280
philosophers and the theologians. So far as the law is concerned, right now, and one of the most
00:36:50.320
important things, and we are embarking on a project called Project Truth, and that is to educate about
00:36:57.460
the law, the law about determination of death. It has two ways. It's either one or two. You're only dead
00:37:04.780
one way. And the focus is on cessation of brain function. But a cessation of function is not
00:37:13.120
enough. Even if you put words in front of it like you're reversible, it's a cessation of the brain
00:37:18.800
activity. That is not enough. It has to be more than that. That's the number two way in the law.
00:37:25.360
But the number one way in the law is used because they can't use the number two way because they have
00:37:32.780
clear evidence of a functioning brain, but they still want their organ. So what they do is they
00:37:39.140
take away their life support, and then they don't take it away long enough for someone to be dead. They
00:37:46.820
take it away long enough so they don't have a pulse. That is, so they don't have circulation enough to
00:37:52.360
detect a pulse. And then they call them heart dead, and then they start everything else up. And then to
00:37:59.140
ensure that they can't ever have a functioning brain, they cut their carotid arteries off to make
00:38:06.500
sure they don't become conscious as they're doing their procedures. All of this stuff is evil. So my
00:38:13.480
golden objective is to educate the people about the determination of death act, which is a bad law,
00:38:20.880
which is based on bad medicine, which is contrary to the truth, and then to have a good law. And we do
00:38:28.280
have a good law. Good law says no one shall be declared dead unless the circuitry and respiratory
00:38:35.660
systems and the entire brain have been destroyed. It's a good law. It works good. It protects the
00:38:42.480
life of the person, which is the standard of law should be across the board generally, that it shouldn't
00:38:50.200
be just there for some religion, whatever that is, that kind of thing, or some Russian race, or some
00:38:58.260
other thing, some how much money, whatever it is. The law, so far as life and death is concerned,
00:39:06.100
is the same for everybody, no matter what it is. We are alive from our creation, each person is, and
00:39:12.920
what do we do as human beings? Because God loves us and we love God, we love other human beings, and
00:39:21.300
we protect and preserve the life of that. And once the creation is there, then preservation has to be
00:39:29.140
there, and preservation includes the circulation and respiration and other things that have to happen.
00:39:36.000
And then when the soul separates, what you have left is destruction. The only question is, how much
00:39:44.180
destruction do you have to have before you declare them dead? Well, it's absolutely foolish to call them
00:39:51.700
dead when they're digesting food and putting out urine and that kind of thing. Anybody who can think
00:39:58.000
a little bit knows that that's not death. Indeed. Dr. Byrne, thank you so much for that. Where can people go
00:40:04.080
for more information, particularly if they want to see what is going on with brain death to get themselves
00:40:11.160
a power of attorney, which gives them protection so that they're not, they don't have their organs taken
00:40:16.960
or that their loved ones are protected? Yes, where they can go two ways, at least two, but one is
00:40:22.780
www.lifeguardianfoundation.org. We have information there. Incidentally, we get sent out cards and you can
00:40:32.000
sign the card saying you don't want to be an organ donor. But what is more important on that card,
00:40:38.320
it says you want to be treated. You want to be treated. If you get into the system, you want to be
00:40:44.320
treated so you can get that card. The other thing that is going on there is there are two books that
00:40:50.580
are available. One is by Heidi Classic, The Fallacies of Brain Death. It's very, very important.
00:40:57.100
And there is a book that's been written about me, my name, and Defender of Life. It's not my cup of tea
00:41:04.900
to do much about propagating my own self. Over the years, I've been asked and I've never had time.
00:41:11.300
Christopher Bogosh, an intensive care nurse, wanted to write it, so he wrote it. But the purpose of the
00:41:19.480
book is not me. The purpose of the book is to educate that the laws about death are bad in the
00:41:28.700
United States. They're bad under all the states, and they must be repealed, and they must be replaced
00:41:34.940
with a law that will protect the life of the person until death. And so we're on Project Truth. We need
00:41:43.400
people. We will take them from every state and any state. The goal and objective is to educate
00:41:49.860
people, and then they educate the legislators, get the bill introduced into the legislature,
00:41:58.800
and then it will be discussed. In some ways, that's how we are to where we are right now, because
00:42:05.120
they wanted to revise the Determination of Death Act to make it even less strict.
00:42:11.580
That brought attention to everybody. This discussion that you and I are having, I started these
00:42:18.520
discussions 40 years ago. And so in some ways, they're really not any different. And sometimes
00:42:25.920
I go back to my early writing and I say, wow, I was saying it already then. I mean it only that way
00:42:33.840
in humility, because the truth doesn't change, John Henry. The truth is there. The truth about life
00:42:41.560
and death, and the truth has to do with creation by God, not evolution. That's all nonsense. And so
00:42:49.000
creation by God, the life of the person is a unity of the body and soul. It's a continual, but continual
00:42:56.800
until death. Death is the event that separates the body and soul, and what you have left on earth
00:43:03.560
are the remains which is manifest as destruction, disintegration, dissolution.
00:43:11.000
Dr. Paul Byrne, thank you so very much. You won't do it, but I will. I would recommend everyone go get
00:43:16.000
the book, Dr. Paul Byrne, Defender of Life. Go to the website also, lifeguardianfoundation.com. Get it there.
00:43:23.300
Dr. Byrne, on behalf of all of our LifeSite crew, thank you for being a staunch defender of life
00:43:28.180
and a defender of the faith and the family. May God bless you.
00:43:34.100
And God bless all of you. And we'll see you next time.
00:43:36.900
Hi, everyone. This is John Henry Weston. We hope you enjoyed this program. To see more like it,
00:43:52.280
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