Should you define your own death?

By Tom Heneghan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Robert Veatch weighs his words carefully when he talks about how people pass away. Most simply die. Some "become dead." Others are "made dead."

Some end-of-life cases are so unclear, he thinks, that people should be able to choose in advance the definition of death they want to be used to declare them deceased.

"Most ordinary people, including most physicians, assume whether you're dead or alive is a science question," Veatch, a Georgetown University medical ethics professor who has lectured about death and dying for over three decades, told Reuters.

"In my view, it's a philosophical and religious issue and different people have different views on the matter," he said at a bioethics seminar at Georgetown's Kennedy School of Ethics.

Thanks to medical progress, terminally ill patients or victims of severe accidents can be kept on life support far beyond the point where they would have died naturally.

Veatch asked if being permanently unconscious and dependent on feeding and hydration tubes is still really life. If not, then people taken off that support are not killed, he argued, but are "made dead" or they "become dead."

The traditional view is that death occurs when the heart and lungs stop. Since the 1970s, Western countries have defined it as the irreversible loss of the entire brain's functions.

But the brain stem can keep basic functions going -- such as breathing -- even in a permanent vegetative or comatose state.