It's been more than three weeks since 13-year-old Jahi McMath was declared brain dead after what appeared to be a tonsillectomy at Children's Hospital Oakland. In the interim, the family has battled the hospital to keep McMath's body hooked up to a ventilator while they have searched for a facility willing to accept her. Friday morning, at a hearing in Alameda Superior Court, the two sides seem to have come to an agreement that the family can possibly remove her, as long as they accept full responsibility for her.
But none of this changes the sad fact that Jahi McMath is dead, as experts patiently explained on KQED's Forum earlier this week.
David Magnus, director of Stanford's Center for Biomedical Ethics, pointed to six separate independent evaluations that have all come to the same conclusion, that McMath is "medically dead, she is legally dead."
And here we get into how language does not clarify, but instead causes confusion. Too often, McMath is referred to as being on "life support." But David Greer, professor of neurology at Yale's School of Medicine, says that is not an appropriate term in this case. "She is legally dead," he explained. "They are simply ventilating a body — or a corpse if you will — and putting oxygen through tissues. ... Of course, that was never the intention for these machines, just to preserve organs in this setting."
The concept of brain death "is not a cutting-edge area of law," Magnus said. According to the Uniform Law Commission, the concept of brain death was first established in 1978 when it became clear "that legal recognition only of traditional criteria — which rely on measuring cessation of respiration and circulation — would no longer suffice." In 1980, the Uniform Determination of Death Act, identified "cardiorespiratory and brain death in accordance with the criteria the medical profession universally accepts." Brain death is specifically defined as "irreversible cessation of all functioning of the brain, including the brain stem."