By Hilary White
LONDON, January 15, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Numerous prominent voices in the UK are strongly objecting to the idea, endorsed by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, to have every British citizen automatically regarded as an organ donor through a “presumed consent” scheme.
Brown promoted the scheme in an op ed piece this week in the Daily Telegraph. The scheme, as Brown explained, would see all British citizens being regarded as potential organ banks unless they go through an official process of opting out. Brown’s suggestion follows recommendations from chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson, who made the recommendation for presumed consent in his annual report last July.
Britons seem to prefer organ donation as a theory, while not widely supporting it in practice. Although polls show 90 per cent support for organ donation, only 25 per cent of the total population is on the NHS Organ Donor Register. In 40 per cent of cases relatives of deceased persons refuse consent for organs to be donated.
Two patients’ organizations blasted the proposed plan, saying it would pose a positive danger to patients’ rights to have control over what happens to their bodies. A major transplant organisation, UK Transplant, which runs the organ donation system, warned that a switch from an altruistic system of voluntary donation to one of coercion could damage transplantation.
The usual Labour supporters in the Guardian and the BBC have endorsed the opt-out idea, with Polly Toynbee, an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, writing an editorial in the Guardian denouncing opposition as a product of right wing and Christian extremism. Toynbee wrote, “when you’re dead, you’re dead.”
“It will lead to a knock-down, drag-out fight with the forces of superstition and reaction – but the spirit of the enlightenment will win,” she wrote.
Toynbee tacitly confirmed the idea, widely lambasted by British conservative journalists and bloggers, that the organs of British citizens belong by right to the state, not to the citizen. “Brown proposes that everyone should be presumed to give consent for their organs to be used after death to save the lives of others. Those who object can register their refusal during their lifetime – or their relatives can refuse. Otherwise heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, corneas and any other life-saving spare parts can be used to transform the lives of many others.”
But others have pointed to this quotation to highlight the dangers to individual freedoms inherent in the presumed consent plan.
The Tory party has come out against the idea with shadow health spokesman, Andrew Lansley, saying, “Only four years ago parliament concluded that to take organs without consent was wrong. It is neither right nor necessary for us to change that view.”
At that time a private members bill put forward by Liberal Democrat MP Evan Harris, who is known in Parliament as a fanatical promoter of abortion and euthanasia, proposed a presumed consent scheme. It was defeated by combined opposition from Labour and the Conservatives.
Melanie Phillips, a columnist for the Daily Mail called the implications of the proposal “truly terrifying,” and “alarmingly coercive”, saying there “is no more fundamental human right than control over our own bodies…eing forced to opt out of automatic donation destroys our inalienable right to control what happens to us.”
She wrote, “The inescapable implication of a donor opt-out is that we no longer possess such control. The presumption instead is that the state controls our bodies and can do what it likes with them after it declares us to be dead.”
She warns that patients will come under increasing pressure not to opt out and that this pressure could include refusal of medical care. She also points to the controversies over what exactly constitutes death for purposes of transplantation. “All the evidence suggests that organs are harvested not from the dead but from the dying. In other words, at the time the organs are removed the patients are still alive…Brain stem death is in fact merely a convenient definition that allows surgeons to remove organs from a living body while they are still being nourished by its blood supply.”
“If Mr. Brown really imagines that he will win popular acclaim by saying that the state will whip out people’s hearts or kidneys without their consent, his advisers undoubtedly need a brain transplant.”
Read Melanie Phillips’ full column:
https://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=559
Read previous LifeSiteNews.com coverage:
Brown Wants Presumed Consent Organ Donation in Britain by Year’s End
https://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/jan/08011406.html