Legal death is a legal pronouncement by a qualified person that further medical care is not appropriate and that a patient should be considered dead under the law. The specific criteria used to pronounce legal death are variable and often depend on certain circumstances in order to pronounce a person legally dead. Controversy is often encountered due to the conflicts between moral and ethical values.
The increasing demand for organs for organ transplantation is a major focus of concern due to the increasing technological advances in medical equipment. These advances are causing further questions on the actual definition of death. With so many questions revolving around the issues of legal death, declaring a person legally dead in many cases becomes far more than just a medical concern as it involves ethical concerns as well.
Read more about Legal Death: Organ Transplants, Brain Death, Cryonics, Moral and Ethical Issues
Famous quotes containing the words legal and/or death:
“I have spent all my life under a Communist regime, and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“American family life has never been particularly idyllic. In the nineteenth century, nearly a quarter of all children experienced the death of one of their parents.... Not until the sixties did the chief cause of separation of parents shift from death to divorce.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)