ABSTRACT
Anencephalic infants are considered as valuable sources for organ procurement because, apart from neurological malformation, other organs are regarded as suitable for transplantation. Anencephalic infants are not dead according to brainstem or whole brain criteria for death. Non-voluntary live organ donation is only sanctioned for infants and incompetents who are close family members and then only with regenerating tissues or double organs such as kidneys, and sanctioned with reference to a legal fiction that the living infant donor will have future psychological benefit from the survival of the older relative. According to existing moral and legal guidelines anencephalic infants have legal rights according to their status as persons. As such, removal of organs is illegal whilst they are alive. One alternative to a redefinition of death in terms of higher brain formulations, which would include spontaneously breathing persistent vegetative states as well as anencephaly, is to define the latter as a special moral and legal category such as ‘brain absent’.
