A telegraph reports that a University professor of Oslo has triggered many people online after being accused of endorsing a controversial idea that the bodies of brain stem dead women could be used to carry surrogate pregnancies.
Brain death is also known as brain stem death. It is when a person on an artificial life support machine no longer has any brain functions. This means they will not regain consciousness or be able to breathe without support.
A person who is brain dead is legally confirmed as dead. They have no chance of recovery because their body is unable to survive without artificial life support.
The Colombian Medical College published an article which focused on a November 2022 paper from Norwegian philosophy professor, Anna Smajdor, in which she argues that using the uteruses of women who previously gave consent but are now clinically brain dead to carry surrogate pregnancies to full term ‘deserves serious consideration,’ and might be thought of in the same way as organ donation.
The idea or concept which the professor called it “whole body gestational donation” or WBGD and an idea that “deserves serious consideration.”
Anna, who works for the University of Oslo, refers to this idea as ‘whole body gestational donation’ or ‘WBGD.’
According to Women’s Health this concept was first proposed by an Israeli researcher in 2000.
In the journal published in the journal Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, Anna writes:
“It seems plausible that some people would be prepared to consider donating their whole bodies for gestational purposes just as some people donate parts of their bodies for organ donation.”
She continued by saying that pregnancies can be carried out successfully in full term by a brain dead woman.
“We already know that pregnancies can be successfully carried to term in brain-dead women. There is no obvious medical reason why initiating such pregnancies would not be possible. The bodies of brain stem dead women would need to be kept functionally alive using a ventilator.”
Something Anna recognises is ‘a disturbing prospect’ and one which involves ‘treating the patient’s dead body as a means to an end, rather than as an end in itself.”
This however, she argues, is already a part of our existing process to donate organs from a dead person to an alive one.
