Does Brain Dead Mean Dead?

This article was about a girl named Jahi McMath who is only 13 years old. Jahi was suffering from cardiac arrest and was put on a ventilator to be kept alive. Later on her cardiac arrest worsened and her brain began to lose blood flow, so the doctors decided to take her off of the ventilator since she was brain dead. But does this mean she is actually dead? People are arguing on whether to take her off of the ventilator because her parents believe she is still alive due to her blood circulation and movement.

This article relates to a biology class I have taken. It also relates to a science class I took in eighth grade. It relates because this article is about blood circulation through the body. In those classes we constantly talked about blood circulation through the body and how the body is affected because of it.

I do understand  that the parents are very upset about their daughter but she honestly can’t live life on a ventilator. The doctors say she is brain dead so that means there is no brain activity going on within her head. How could you live a happy life being brain dead and not being able to understand anything that is going on around you? Their daughter wouldn’t be her normal self and she wouldn’t be able to do anything but lay in bed and be blank if she was kept alive.

What is the author’s point of view, and how does it impact the overall effect of the text? Use evidence from the selection to support your answer.

- The author doesn’t show much on their point of view and they mainly stay informational throughout the entire article. It affects the text by making in an informational piece of a news story. They show this in paragraph five by saying, “it is not a vegetative state -- it is absence of brain activity, and constitutes a legal measure of death in all states.”(Veatch). They are being informational by explaining to the audience what the standard rules are for being brain dead.

Another example is in paragraph six when the author gives us information on the opinion of a Harvard professor, “A significant minority in the medical profession continue to believe people with dead brains and beating hearts are still alive. Believers include some of our wisest minds -- a Harvard professor”. (Veatch). This means that the author is trying to show that their story is a credible news source by using professionals.

 

Robert Veatch. “Let Parents Decide if Teen is Dead”. CNN. 2 Jan 2014. Web. 10 Jan 2014,

<http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/02/opinion/veatch-defining-death/index.html?hpt=us_mid>

Diane, Reid. “Patient Room with Hospital Bed”. photograph. commons.wikimedia. MediaWiki, 21 Jan 2013. Web. 10 Jan 2014,  <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Patient_room_with_hospital_bed.jpg>