Vatican newspaper article challenges 'brain death' notion
By JOHN L. ALLEN JR.
News Analysis
Debates over when life begins are by now wearily familiar, if no closer to resolution ? witness Democratic presidential candidate Barak Obama?s recent comment that pegging a precise moment is ?above my pay grade.? Yet a Sept. 2 article in L?Osservatore Romano, the official Vatican newspaper, suggests that an equally agonizing debate is brewing at the other end of the biological continuum ? not over when life begins, but when it ends.