By Hilary White
LONDON, January 14, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Gordon Brown’s Labour government is contemplating a move to force Britons to become organ donors unless they have specifically opted out. Prime Minister Brown wrote this weekend in an op ed in the Daily Telegraph that he wants to “start a debate” on the so-called “presumed consent” concept that Brown said would “close the aching gap between the potential benefits of transplant surgery and the limits imposed by our current system of consent”.
Brown’s “different consent system” would mean consent for organ donation after death would be automatically presumed, unless individuals had opted out of the national register, or family members objected.
But even before such a debate is started, new recommendations from a government task force would increase pressure on health care workers to identify more “potential organ donor” patients. Pressure will be placed on patients to donate as hospitals will be rated for the number of deceased patients they “convert” into donors. The taskforce will publish this summer a report on “presumed consent”, which is supported by the British Medical Association.
Sir Liam Donaldson, the Chief Medical Officer, told media this summer that after death people should automatically have their organs removed for transplant, unless they opted out while alive.
Patients’ groups have wholeheartedly condemned the presumed consent scheme, saying it will remove patients’ control over their own bodies. Joyce Robin of Patient Concern told the Telegraph, “They call it presumed consent, but it is no consent at all. They are relying on inertia and ignorance to get the results that they want.”
Katherine Murphy, of the Patients Association charity, added, “We don’t think a private decision, which is a matter of individual conscience, should be taken by the state”.
Brown, who inherited the office from his predecessor and has yet to be elected, said he hoped the scheme could be put in place this year.
More pressure than ever before is being placed on medical systems to procure organs for transplant patients, and the push is increasing to have the organs removed from patients who are dead only in a narrowly defined legal sense. Concerns are growing that patients on life support who have the ability to recover may be killed in order to obtain their organs. The definition of death has been progressively altered under the pressure to increase the number of donors, to include those whose hearts are still beating.
Dr. Michael DeVita, a critical care physician at UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, said in 2006, “It gets worse when you’re going to withdraw life support and then procure organs. People get more and more concerned that you’re going to be caring for people who are dying inappropriately just to get at their organs.”
In April last year, moves to bring about a presumed consent system in Ontario were rejected by a government-sponsored panel after doctors said they don’t want to be seen as “organ-seizing ghouls”.
Read related LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Questions Answered on Organ Donation: Interview with Dr. John B. Shea M.D.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2006/feb/06021709.html