With the growing success of organ transplantation in the early 1980s, organ donation from anencephalic infants became a topic for practical and ethical consideration. Criteria for brain death guided ...

In a radical departure from standard medical practice, doctors in Canada last week kept alive a baby born without most of her brain so that her heart might be salvaged for a transplant operation. The ...

Eighteen months after declaring it ethically acceptable to take organs for transplant from infants who were born with only a small part of the brain but are not brain dead, the American Medical ...

TALLAHASSEE — Broward County’s Baby Theresa case went before the Florida Supreme Court on Wednesday, with justices asked to decide whether a baby born without a brain is legally dead. The decision — ...

Every day in the United States, 21 people die on the organ wait-list. 1 As clinicians, researchers and institutions seek additional opportunities to expand organ and tissue donation, we must continue ...

The condition known as anencephaly – lacking a brain – affects about 3 pregnancies per every 10,000 in the United States. Small odds though it seems, Keri Young and her husband were unfortunate to ...

In the state of Florida, in the case of 6-day-old Theresa Ann Pearson, the difference is four little words. The law says brain death occurs when all functions of the brain, “including the brain stem,” ...

The Hastings Center Report explores the ethical, legal, and social issues in medicine, health care, public health, and the life sciences. Six issues are published each year, containing an assortment ...

An anencephalic girl in Brazil has survived for two weeks - against all odds and medical prognosis - and has sparked a new debate in the country about the legalization of abortion in such cases.

Little Marcela de Jesus Galante Ferreira has broken all the records of survival. The anencephaly she suffers should have caused her death hours or days after birth, but to the amazement of many, she ...