Organ transplants 75 seconds after heart stops beating?????

When does death occur? There is a controversial new procedure in which doctors remove the hearts of severely brain-damaged newborns less than two minutes after the babies are disconnected from life support and their hearts stop beating, so the organs can be transplanted into infants who would otherwise die. I think this controversial organ-retrieval strategy is beyond acceptable legal, moral and ethical boundaries. How can you remove hearts from babies who are not brain-dead. They are not waiting long enough to make sure the infants met either of the long-accepted definitions of death -- complete, irreversible cessation of brain function or of heart and lung function. I think this even borders on being murder.

This should NOT be done. It used to be the standards for organ transplants to be done after the person was declared "brain-dead" but now "donation after cardiac death" or DCD is being promoted. DCD usually involves patients who have devastating and irreversible brain damage but are not actually brain-dead. Their families consent to removing life support, and their organs are removed minutes after the patients' hearts stop beating.

I am against DCD organ transplantation because a question can be raised as to if the person is really dead and 2 minutes isn't long enough to make that determination. Doctors at the Denver Children's Hospital had started removing hearts from babies, sometimes waiting only 75 seconds to increase the chances that the organs would be viable. The reason for the hastiness is that the organ donation rates of success go up the less time that lapses between the organ ceasing and the surgeons removing it. I think saving the little lives who get the organs is terrific but not at the expense of those giving the ultimate gift, their lives. I question whether the donor babies were truly dead when their hearts were removed. If the hearts were restarted in another child's body, this means that the cessation was not irreversible. I don't think this practice is ethically justified because the donors are not dead.