“…Whereas the Harvard standard requires the complete silence of the nervous system (Harvard Medical School 1968, 338), 19 the AAN guidelines affirm that the presence of a whole host of clinical signs, such as profuse sweating, blushing, tachycardia, sudden increase in blood pressure, motor stretch reflexes, Babinski reflex, and spontaneous movements of the limbs, is compatible with death (Wijdicks 1995, 1007). In other words, the change from the Harvard standard to the AAN guidelines is a post hoc move in order exclude those functions that are preserved in brain-dead patients as irrelevant, which then makes it possible to uphold the claim that BD is death (Nguyen 2019, 298–302; Nair-Collins 2015, 74). With its assertion that the presence of neuroendocrine function, reflexes, and spontaneous movements is compatible with death, the AAN standard contradicts both scientific realism and the tenets of sound anthropology, in particular, Christian anthropology as held and taught by the Catholic Church (Nguyen 2019).…”