Proposed UDDA Revisions Expand Law That Allows Euthanasia of Organ Donors 

In August of 1968, an ad hoc committee of physicians at Harvard Medical School wrote a landmark paper that defined people in irreversible coma as dead. This utilitarian pronouncement was made to skirt the ethical and legal issues involved in procuring organs from people who were biologically alive (i.e., have a beating heart, respiration, blood circulation, and other signs of life). In 1981, the Uniform Determination of Death Act (UDDA) codified into law the Harvard committee’s recommendations.