Controversy over ‘non-heart beating’ organ donors: “The possibility of a new source of organs for transplant is appealing
because it might alleviate a small part of the shortage of donor organs…. But the emergence of a form of organ donation where the donor’s
heartbeat and breathing have stopped but he is not brain dead unsettles
some ethicists and philosophers, and it has made the procedure
vulnerable to bad publicity.

Sometimes, families permit the patient to be whisked, still alive and still on
the ventilator, to the operating room for organ recovery. Only in the OR is
the ventilator removed, the heart and lungs stop, and the patient can be
declared dead. That borders on ‘ritualized surgical savagery,’ contends George Annas,
professor of health law at the Boston University School of Public Health.” Boston Globe