Can the 'Brain Dead' Dance?
Verbal constructs disguising corrupt medicine: It is all around you, yet unseen by most
The Real Wound Roe Inflicted — and Why It Still Bleeds
Heidi Klessig MD is a retired anesthesiologist who writes and speaks on the ethics of organ donation and transplant. Her new book is “The Brain Death Fallacy.” It’s a confessional. She candidly admits that she had been brainwashed by the organ-donation medical culture into anesthesizing and even silencing, through medicinal paralysis, healthy individuals, so that their vital organs could be then sold into the organ donation chain. They need not have died.
How could the medical profession have come to this? This departure from medical ethics in the United States came more than fifty years ago. Roe v. Wade and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton, had explicitly granted individual physicians the authority to disregard their oath to never intentionally harm a patient in their care.
Despite the simplistic chatter of the media, and even many pro-life individuals influenced by the media, The real offense of Roe was not that it overrode the Tenth Amendment. The great and mortal wound was far more profound: the Court instructed physicians that they were no longer bound—legally or ethically—by the ancient prohibition against killing their patients.
Before 1973, every state regulated medicine on the same foundational assumption: doctors exist to heal, not to kill—even if asked. This was not a religious doctrine or a quaint tradition. It was the moral boundary that distinguished medicine from violence. The Hippocratic Oath’s command—“I will give no deadly medicine, even if asked”—was not symbolic. It was operative.
Roe dismantled that boundary.
The Court did not merely legalize abortion. It medicalized killing. By insisting that abortion be performed by licensed physicians while simultaneously dismissing the Hippocratic Oath as “dated,” the Court severed medical law from moral law. Medical care was redefined as morally neutral technique. The physician became a technician of desired outcomes rather than a guardian of life.
After Roe, medical science could be used to intentionally harm—yes, and to kill.
And it is eagerly doing so.
This ethical revolution did not end with abortion. Once killing is reclassified as care, consent replaces conscience. Procedure replaces judgment. Vulnerability becomes opportunity.
That is why the 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, while significant, did not in any way heal the wound. Dobbs simply corrected a jurisdictional error. It returned abortion policy to the states. But it explicitly declined to address the ethical premise Roe imposed on medicine itself. It said nothing about Roe’s deepest wound to American culture, to the body politic and to the continued fog over individual’s consciences: whether physicians may intentionally kill. Dobbs was silent on whether “do no harm” still has legal meaning.
The Roe ethic remains intact.
And nowhere is that ethic more visible—or more terrifying—than in the modern organ procurement system.
Consider the recent Kentucky case of TJ Hoover. Protesting and even looking around as he was being prepared for ‘donating’, he was a man who still lived and wanted to continue doing so. This is one of many stories related by Dr.Klessig. It should haunt anyone who still believes medicine is unambiguously on the side of life. A young man, declared “brain dead,” was being prepared for organ harvesting. He was moving so much en route to cardiac catheterization that staff administered a paralyzing drug. When the drug wore off, he was looking around. A whistleblower reported that he was thrashing and visibly crying. His family was told these were “reflexes.”
Two physicians refused to proceed with the surgery.
The response was not moral pause or reevaluation. According to reports, an organ procurement supervisor told staff to find another doctor and carry on.
Thankfully, that did not happen. The man survived. He later danced—joyfully—at his sister’s wedding.
That image matters.
A man once classified as medically dead, treated as a collection of usable parts, (for market) stood upright and danced at a family celebration. He was not a reflex. He was not a protocol failure. He was a living human being who narrowly escaped being killed by a system that had defined him as expendable. And of course, profitable.
This is not an anomaly. It is Roe’s logic brought to its logical conclusion.
“Brain death” itself is not death; it is a social construct designed to permit organ harvesting while circulation vitally continues. And the uncomfortable truth is this: every so-called brain-dead patient is biologically alive. That is why organs can be harvested in the first place.
Once medicine is authorized to kill in one category of cases, the categories expand. The language becomes softer—autonomy, dignity, quality of life—but the act remains the same. The physician becomes the agent of death, shielded by law and protocol.
This is the real unfinished business of the Right to Life.
The central question is not merely who writes abortion statutes. It is whether medicine will remain a healing art or become a managed killing service. Until the law once again affirms that no physician may intentionally kill, or harm, a fellow human being—even if asked—the Roe regime persists, regardless of court rulings about jurisdiction.
So what can you do? This is just not another, inapplicable ‘egg-headed essay.’ There are things which must be done - if you actually care.
First, do not casually sign—or allow loved ones to sign—the now routine “organ donor” authorizations without serious understanding that it may throw you into the medical industrial complex. In a medical culture that increasingly blurs the line between death and convenience, such permissions are not morally neutral paperwork. They are consent forms written for a system under pressure to procure organs quickly and efficiently.
Second, study what is happening in medicine right now. Do not rely on slogans or assurances. Ask hard questions. Ask whether killing has been normalized under the language of care.
And finally, ask your personal physicians directly: Do they abide by the ethical strictures of the Hippocratic Oath? Are they willing to refuse—not merely perform, but refuse to refer—patients to specialists whose purpose is to end life? I’ve done so and gladly found another doctor. Many are simply walking through the profession unawares.
The man dancing at his sister’s wedding is not a sentimental image. He is living evidence that this debate is not abstract. Lives quite literally depend on whether medicine remembers what it is for.
Until that question is answered rightly, the wound Roe inflicted remains very much open and seething.