UK Considers Opt-Out for Organ Donation

In celebrating the 60th anniversary of Britain’s National Health Service, Prime Minister Gordon Brown wrote a piece for the Sunday Telegraph in which he called for a change in the way organ donation is done in his country. He suggested, rather mildly, that the UK adopt a system whereby a person must “opt-out” of being an organ donor. While the topic is rather ghoulish, the opt-out policy is the only way for a civilized society to be truly pro-life.

The PM laid out the fundamental statistics, “There are currently more than 8,000 people in the UK awaiting organ donation but only 3,000 transplants are carried out each year. Sadly, that means that more than 1,000 people die each year waiting for transplants.” What he didn’t note was the number of perfectly viable organs that were cremated or buried, and that’s because no one has the number. However, it is certainly more than 1,000, and indeed, it is probably sufficient to reduce the waiting list to almost zero.

What he could say was, “In Britain we have 14.9 million people on the organ donor register - which is around 24 per cent of the population. In terms of actual donors (not just people willing to give, but those whose organs are actually used) we have a rate of about 13 donors per million in our population. This compares with about 22 per million in France, 25 per million in America and around 35 per million in Spain - the best in the world.” Spain uses an opt-out system of “presumed consent.”

The nature of the subject makes politicians like Mr. Brown jumpy. He was very timid in his proposal, “A serious debate - involving the public most of all, but also bringing in professional views and those of religious leaders - is long overdue. To facilitate it, Alan Johnson [Secretary of State for Health] and I have asked the Organ Donation Taskforce to begin consulting on the question of a move to a different consent system.” When politicians talk about consulting and starting debate, they are saying they don’t want to be very far out in the lead because the issue is potentially career-ending.

For example on the same day, the Telegraph ran a headine, “Organs to be Taken Without Consent,” and the article that followed led with the sentence, “Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to take organs from dead patients without explicit consent.” The piece added, “patients' groups said that they were ‘totally opposed’ to Mr Brown's plan, saying that it would take away patients' rights over their own bodies.”

Quite what right a dead person has to his own body is hard to see as the dead don’t have rights – only the living do. The dead can’t vote, nor can the dead own property. Meanwhile, there are 1,000 Britons every year who join the ranks of the dead because there was no organ available for transplant. This is a change that has to be made, for the sake of the living.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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