I think it’s a great idea: everyone is considered an organ donor unless they opt not to be one, and (IIRC) what they decided is what goes despite what a spouse/guardian/bff says.
I know someone who didn’t get a donor sticker on their liscnece because the person at the BMV forgot to ask. This would be a moot point.
When my grandfather died my grandmother had to fill out forms to confirm he was still and organ donor and that she did not want to “overide” his choice. There would now be no paper work, and she wouldn’t have the option to overide him being a donor.
So what are the cons? I know some people have a real issue with this, but why?
No idea what people are complaining about. You die, you lose your rights over your body. Frankly the opt out is only justified as a pragmatic concession to the relatives.
I agree. Anyone who has a problem donating their organs can opt out so they don’t have to. Some people say that they don’t like the idea of the government somehow “owning” their organs, but these concerns are misplaced - as evidenced by that fact that people could choose to opt out. This idea would save thousands of lives.
Let’s see, let’s pretend for a moment that it matters if your organs are cut out of your body or not…just gimme a sec…and hand me that torque wrench…
Okay, the adjustment is made. Hey! My organs are valuable - why should the default be that you can take them? Corpses belong to somebody, and it clearly isn’t the state, or the state would be sent the bill for all mortuary services. So why should the state have the right to come in unasked and root around and walk off with the valuable bits?
Okay, so there’s a social need for it. So? Social needs always fall behind property rights, at least in this country.
Now, those who say an opt-out makes it all okay - tell me what’s the difference between the opt-out and the opt-in? We’ll note that opt-in does preserve property rights, explicitly; but aside from that. Why go for opt-out rather than opt-in?
Well, it’s obviously to snap up the people who don’t care, who are lazy, who are inattentive, or who are uninformed. Presumably you could get most of the people who don’t care through other means, such as by making it a mandatory checkbox on their drivers’ liscence renewal form, so that they’d have to answer one way or the other. But what about the others? You’re looting their graves, essentially; taking their organs without asking. And in my opinion that’s your goal - along the lines of stealing any bicycle you can ride off with. Hey, if they cared, they’d take their front tire with them!
Barring spouses and relatives from stopping you proves the point - these people own the corpse. It’s quite literally their property. By what logic do you have the right to come in and make use of somebody’s property over their express refusal to allow it? Do I have the similar right to walk into your house and take your photo albums and souveneers? Come on, the things are valueless; what do you care?
No, a corpse is NOT simply private property, nor owned as such by the family, and never has been treated that way in law.
I started a thread about this not too long ago. What is the legal status of a corpse? In it you will find some links to articles discussing the question and case law about it. What it boils down to is that the states could probably enact opt out laws if they chose. Some of them might have to revise their legal definitions of property, and some would not. At the present time it is unlikely the Federal government could do enact such a law, because defining ‘property’ is something that has been traditionally done at the state level.
The problem I have with it is doctors and surgeons who may want to harvest organs too soon. “He’s going to die anyway…” Or, “This patient’s organs are going to be very valuable…”
And then there are countries with the death penalty, like China…
Wasn’t there a film, Coma(?), about the possible abuse of organ donation?
Your organs are clearly not valuable to you after you are dead. Since, in the Western world at least, your heirs cannot sell them, they are not valuable to them either.
The state is not walking off with valuable bits - the person whose life is saved is. The state is not making any money off of this either.
Since any person has the option to prevent his or her organ from being donated, there is no violation of property rights going on here. Someone’s property rights are not being violated if they are too lazy to check a check box. As for what the difference is, here is data from Thaler which we use in our behavioral economics lecture:
Donation rates for countries with opt-in:
Denmark, 4%, Netherlands, 27%, UK, 17%, Germany, 12%.
Rates for countries with opt-out:
Austria, 89%, Belgium, 98%, France, 99% - you get the picture.
Clearly defaults are working here, just like they do in the well known 401K study.
Thaler discusses mandatory check boxes in Nudge - I’d have to check what the experiments say. As for the bike, I rather suspect your organs being taken cause you less grief than having to take your tire into a restaurant. Unless you plan on becoming a zombie, of course.
Who is doing anything over someone’s express refusal? Certainly not that of the deceased. It is likely that the relatives don’t know the wishes of the deceased or are not present in cases of accident. Why not go with the implied wishes? Are you sure that someone not opting-in in an opt-in system any less likely to want organs donated than someone no opting out in an opt-out system doesn’t? That’s not what the data says, does it. Given that, we need to balance the chance to saves lives versus the property rights of dead people. I kind of come down on the side of the living myself.
As the data I posted shows, in an opt-out system there will be many more organs available, so the chances of abuse will be diminished. The only way to stop this entirely is to outlaw organ donation entirely, but the horse is out of that barn already, and why let real people die for a potential abuse?
This same problem exists already for known organ donors. Why wait? And speaking of popular media, there was an episode of *Law and Order *on exactly this, a doctor choosing to harvest organs early and being tried (and convicted) of murder.
As the law currently stands in the US, if a person wants to be an organ donor, but his heirs don’t want someone carving up Dear Aunt Agatha, then the heirs can prevent the donation. I think that if Aunt Agatha wants to be an organ donor, that nobody should be able to prevent her last wishes from being carried out.
I’d also like to see an opt-out option, with the stipulation that if you opt out, you are ineligible for any organ transplants. That is, if you aren’t willing to donate, you don’t get any donations. Anyone who decides to opt back in isn’t eligible for donations for at least 10 years, to prevent people from opting in and out as they need organs.
And yes, I am a donor. Assuming, of course, that my husband will follow my wishes after I’m dead. I told him to donate what he could, let the med students carve up on my body after that, and whatever’s left over should be formed into one of those synthetic diamonds, as the stone in the engagement ring for his next wife.
At the very least the state is walking off with the money it’s not paying to the family of the deceased.
And I am totally going to steal all of your photos. That crap is worthless, so you don’t mind if I use it for toilet paper, right?
BULLSHIT.
If one can show that the state does own the corpse, per what I gather from Boyo Jim’s post without reading through his link, then there might be no property rights to be violated. But the notion that your property rights are something that begin when you assert them is complete unmitigated unsupportable bullshit.
That’s a nifty pro of opt-out, and thus belongs in the thread. However it has zippo to do with property rights - you’re basically saying that the social good justifies the state taking your stuff without your permission. Which is the case for taxes - but not much else. Even with eminent domain the state is required to pay for the seized property.
As you well know, it’s the family of the corpse that’s the issue. That you pretending otherwise shows that you are unwilling to debate the issue directly, which I presume is because you believe that know that your arguments as so weak that they would crumple instantly if you did.
If you wanted not to sound ridiculous, you could make the argument that the wishes of the deceased should be overrideable by their family members, on the basis that the person is dead, so their body is now their families to chop up or preserve bronzed on the mantelpiece as they wish. Trying to argue the opposite is transparent sophistry in pursuit of your goal of stealing the organs for the greater good.
Actually, since you’re the one claiming that corpses are property in the legal sense and this is all about property rights, maybe you should first show that corpses are property. I don’t see why they should have to disprove something that has not yet been proven.
What about minors? Are they opt in (w/ parental consent) until they turn 18?
I don’t like the opt-in approach as it assumes the state owns your corpse unless you specifically say that it doesn’t. Plus, lots of people don’t think about this at all, and I can just see the lawsuits caused by this.
Is my body mine prior to my death? Then it’s mine after absent statute to the contrary. The looking up of which is not my homework to do.
Of course, even if my body isn’t my property before/after my death, it is still absurdly false to argue that it would become so due to opting to own it. That argument, which is what I was what I was responding to, remains bullshit. (Though I do admit the idea has its interesting facets - could I opt to own somebody else’s body, if I got to it before they did? There’re a few women I know…assuming I didn’t have to wait until their death to claim ownership of their bodies, that is.)
That’s been my objection, too. (The OP may also want to see this past thread on the subject.) Having had more time to think about it, I don’t know if I’m opposed to the opt-in system itself or just to this line of argument in support of it. Most Dopers don’t seem to have a problem with the idea of society owning or being entitled to your body after you die, but I do. With sufficient notifications and opportunities for the families of the deceased to object, maybe I could get behind this.
If we assume that my body is my own property while I’m alive, it does not necessarily follow that it’s my family’s property after I’m dead. If I leave a will that specifies who gets my property after I die, then that’s who gets my property (which might or might not be family). If I don’t leave a will, then the state has rules in place for deciding who gets my property by default. All we’re talking about here is changing the default rules. If I would prefer that the contents of my bank account go to my favorite mistress, but I’m too lazy to make a will, the state will, after I die, distribute the contents of my bank account according to some formula among my closest relatives. Would you say that the state has stolen that money from my mistress? No, of course not, because it never belonged to her. It belonged to me, and then after I died, ownership of it transferred to someone else, and since I was to lazy to specify otherwise, the state chose who that someone else was.
Objectively speaking, this is my objection too - the goal of opt-out seems to specifically be to take without asking. ‘We’re not going to listen to the living, and when we asked the corpse it didn’t say no!’
I could get completely behind ‘mandatory opt’ - where we force people to check one or the other, hopefully at some juncture in their life when we’ll be able to get pretty comprehensive coverage of the population. After all, according to the stats given it seems that at least 62% of the population doesn’t opt either way - that’s a lot of unknowns!
Logically there are four categories of people:
would and have opted in (if it’s opt-in)
would opt in but haven’t (if it’s opt-in)
would opt out but haven’t (if it’s opt-out)
would and have opted out (if it’s opt-out)
With either opt-in or opt-out, the policy will sweep up both groups 2 and 3 - and one of those groups will be treated contrary to their will. In my opinion the best approach morally speaking would be to minimize groups 2 and 3 as much as possible, to reduce the number of people so treated. The opt-out people seem to want those groups as large as possible, to be better able to harvest the unwilling.
I’m sure she’ll love it. She can show it off to all her friends. “No, it’s not a natural diamond. It’s the remains of my new husband’s first wife! So that every time he looks at my hand he can remember her.”
Looking at some references, it is clear that families do have the final say. If you want to donate an organ, do you wish your family to go against your wishes - and vice versa? Any objection to a doctor telling an uncertain family that the deceased could have refused donation, but chose not to?
From my search, it appears that a frequent issue is that families are worried that they’ll have to pay for the organ being extracted. Being paid for the organ is not an issue. Do you think that paying for organs could never lead to abuse in your libertarian fantasyland?
Unless you have a side business of knocking people out, sticking them in a bath tub and stealing their kidneys, I have no idea of why you are so upset about presumed consent.
