Word: deaths
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...have created a Faustian dilemma. Each year in the U.S. hundreds of infants die who could have been saved by a new heart; literally millions of people with diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's may eventually benefit from tissue implants. Should physicians manipulate the definitions of life and death to meet this growing demand for donor tissue? The question is taking on a new immediacy as doctors begin transplanting tissue from once unimagined sources: aborted fetuses and anencephalic newborns...
...many, the fetal-tissue transplant raised a troubling question: Should doctors be allowed to use tissue from intentionally aborted fetuses to alleviate an otherwise hopeless condition? The Baby Gabriel case focused on even knottier dilemmas: Should laws defining death be rewritten to allow the "harvesting" of anencephalic donors? Should their existence be prolonged solely to enable doctors to take their organs...
...organs, as a way of making their brief, tragic lives meaningful. Such babies are often born with no skin or skull above their eyes. They have only an exposed bud of a brain and a brain stem that keeps their heart and lungs working erratically. Under current state laws, death occurs when all brain activity has ceased. Anencephalic infants are technically alive until their brain stem stops functioning. By then, however, the increasingly insufficient oxygen supply has ruined any potentially useful organs...
...some doctors, the respirator is an ideal solution: it assures a proper oxygen supply while putting off the infant's inevitable death. "There is no ethical problem with using the organs after the child is dead," says George Annas, professor of health law at Boston University School of Medicine. "The problem lies in the process of getting the child from alive to dead." There are certainly precedents for keeping donors alive artificially for the benefit of others. Accident victims, for example, are frequently kept on respirators to keep their organs fresh...
...groups went their own separate ways; some, like the Panthers and the Weathermen, down a dark road of alienation, hermetic ideology and increasing violence that frequently ended in death or prison for their followers. Others, like the women's movement, were able to sustain their political vitality into the Seventies and beyond...