You mean opt-out. We have an opt-in system in most states now, including California, where it is assumed that you do not permit donation unless you fill out some paperwork.
I’m not sure of the law, but I assume parents make decisions for minors, just based on normal ability to sign contracts.
Maybe you can explain this unsubstantiated claim that the state owns your corpse. All presumed consent does is to say that when there is no written record of the wishes of the deceased, the default is that the deceased wishes to permit donation as opposed to not permitting it. The state neither buys, sells, nor owns any organs or corpses. It just removes an area of ambiguity in a private contract between the person and the medical community. If the state owned the corpse, the state would have to pay to bury what is left, wouldn’t it? Is this happening anywhere?
You’re arguing that the only reason a person would object to the state theft of organs is because the person themselves is a thief who would see the state theft as cutting into their business? That’s even funnier, despite being forum inappropriate.
Let’s cut the crap, shall we? Society would benefit if more people would donate organs. (I dunno if we need 99% donorship but whatever.) There are, as noted, four types of people, divided orthogonally along the lines of ‘wants to donate or not’ and ‘has said so or not’. There are three possible ways to increase the number of donors - promote voluntary opting in though advertising or the like, force more people to opt one way or the other at some point, or just declare that you have the right to take any corpse that’s not nailed down.
The latter approach is virtually certain to give you more coverage, and it’s doubtlessly the easiest and least expensive approach as well. On the ‘is it moral or not’ front, though, I think it’s the clear loser.
In an ideal world I agree that it would be best to minimize groups 2 and 3, but in the real world this is rather difficult. One thing to do would be to survey people in these groups and see which is bigger. Everything I’ve seen indicates that 2 is, so an opt out policy brings us closer to the wishes of a majority. As for your last statement, please give some evidence that anyone is making it particularly difficult to opt out. Opting in California is not hard but it takes a bit of effort, and I don’t think this is done to discourage people from donating.
You still haven’t told me how the state is stealing anything. And it was meant to be funny. Given that no one would steal your precious organs in an opt-out situation if you made the simple step of opting out, you have no stake in this game - unless you someday needed an organ, that is.
Several studies have shown that when someone starts a job, using a default of opening a 401K dramatically increases participation versus a default of not using one. In the 401K default situation, which is now law, do you consider the company to be stealing money from the employee (to put into their account, matched.) It’s the same deal, really. I hope you can’t find a way of claiming the government is taking anything in this case.
How so? It’s more difficult than not asking at all, but printing a pair of checkboxes on your drivers’ licence registration and renewal forms isn’t exactly a titanic ordeal for the state and would cause opting to skyrocket.
So if we find that 60% of people want to donate, we let them take 60% of each person’s organs? Oh wait, you want to presume that you have 100% access to everyone, for maximum lootage. I see how this is.
The absolute most effective way to make it hard to opt out is to ask them after they’re dead.
And wanting to deny the survivors a say proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is the goal. A more honest approach would be to do the following:
Check to see if the corpse opted one way or the other while breathing.
Attempt to determine the wishes of the deceased through other methods, such as consulting with friends and family or whatever. (Necessarily these people could override with their own wishes; can’t be helped.)
All else failing, claim the body. If it gets this far clearly nobody cares anyway.
But honesty isn’t the point of this approach. Is it.
I don’t really get the objections, either. They seem to be entirely based on principle, which is fine, but it seems a kind of stupid thing to get hung up over when there’s no apparent practical downside to the practice, and an enormous upside to it.
I mean, if everyone is required to donate organs unless they opt out, we get a huge increase in the number of donated organs, saving untold lives. We can all agree that’s a good result. However, the downside to this is that…
And that’s where I hit a wall. What’s the downside to this? Yes, yes, “the government doesn’t own my body” etc. etc. But so what if it does? Where’s the concrete harm of this policy, other than offending the basic ideal of not giving anything to the government if you can possibly avoid it?
Honest question - do I get the organ for free? I honestly don’t know.
Though for your argument’s sake you’d better hope so.
And I don’t give two hairy little farts how simple the step of opting out is - it’s work, and it’s something that massive percentages of the population isn’t going to remember to bother to do. This goes both ways - where’s your 60% of opt-inners? So if you can pretend it’s no problem, I can -and do- turn it right around and say that opt-in is clearly no hardship and so it’s safe to assume that everyone who doesn’t opt in is actually opting out and therefore their organs shouldn’t be taken.
Which is crap, of course, and we both know it - which for some reason isn’t stopping you from arguing as though it were true in the case of opt-outs.
Stealing wouldn’t be the right word, becuase it’s debatable whether anything is being taken, and either way the removal isn’t really permanent - the automatic opt-in can be reversed at any time.
In neither respect is assumed opt-in and organ harvesting “the same deal”.
The objections are indeed on principle. I’ve already frankly admitted that opt in is the easiest and most effective way to get more organs. (On the latter point the stats are present and quite clear.)
But this thread asks for the pros and cons. It’s one thing to say “screw property rights, screw the feelings of the family, hell let’s not even let them opt out - the benefits of 100% donation outweigh the importance of people’s petty sentimentalities.” It’s quite another to pretend that opt-out doesn’t have a downside of this kind.
I’m not pretending that there isn’t a downside, I’m genuinely not understanding what the downside is. I don’t understand why there’s an objection to this at all. We’ve got the pro - but what’s the con? What’s the downside? What bad thing happens if we follow this policy?
People opt out. This means they care what happens to their corpses. There’s evidence that the family sometimes also cares as well. If we presume universal opt-in then we will be going against some people’s wishes as to the disposition of the corpse.
It’s sort of like if the government went in and stole all your family pictures. What’s the harm? (Of course in that case the bigger question is “what’s the benefit?” - which is why we don’t have debates about the government’s right to seize your photo albums.)
So, the only downside is that some undefined number of people will feel bad about it? When weighed against saving hundreds, if not thousands, of lives, I don’t see that as particularly compelling. And I have trouble seeing how you’re arriving at a different conclusion. It seems like such an extremely minor harm, compared to such a concrete good, that your passionate opposition strikes me as very bizarre.
How many times do you need to be told that a corpse is not personal property? It is not, and has not been treated as such as a matter of law.
And a question for you – if YOU wish to donate your organs after death, have an organ donor card and even put it in your will, should your next of kin be able to simply ignore that after your death and prevent the donation?
You can’t sell it or pieces of it, with the possible exception of hair, cuticles, and waste I suppose. You can’t transfer ownership of it to other people, either. It’s yours, but I’m not sure I’d call it property.
Either way, why does it matter? States have lots of laws dealing with property, including what happens to it when someone dies, right? Requiring people to opt out of organ donation is just another property law if you still want to insist on calling a corpse property.
Why should doctors, hospitals, and other medical personnel be able to profit off of the organs of the deceased without compensating their relatives in some manner? The state might not profit but are you telling me all those people performing the transplants aren’t turning a profit?
I am profoundly uncomfortable with the state having automatic rights to a body. If you want people to donate organs than do it via education and moral suasion. Yes, I’m a donor.
What about if a baby is born with extreme profound disablities like anacephely or holoproscencephly? (but they have normal organs. Like they don’t have a syndrome that has damged their organs or anything like that)
When is “too soon?” There ARE many conditions where there’s no hope whatsoever. It FEELS good to think " Yeah medical science can save everyone" But there ARE cases where it’.s pretty much hopeless.
I would be surprised if they charge for the organ. Of course they charge for the procedure itself, and the drugs and medications necessary for the transplant to take, but I very much doubt that there’s any charge for the organ.
Wouldn’t you have to keep them alive for a really long time, or is there a large demand for newborn organs?
And, while a doctor can say that there is no hope, we’ve always treated it like it’s up to the person to decide whether they accept the diagnosis or get another doctor or whatever. No single doctor has the right to say that someone’s life should end. We always decide.
I’d go further and state that opt-out systems are the only truly moral way to structure a national system and that allowing needed, life saving organs to literally rot after being placed in holes in the ground is obscene in the truest sense of the word. Those organs can’t be of any use to anybody but those whose lives can be saved or improved through transplants (and medical students, so if you want to donate your body to science, go for it). But the idea of letting lives end in misery and pain because there was a philosophical point that had to be made after people were dead is nonsensical.
The entity we know as “you” does not exist after death. You cannot object, cannot care, cannot demand property rights. And your family isn’t going to go Egyptian on ya and have your organs extracted and put into jars. While people should be allowed to opt-out, it’s a thoroughly immoral choice.
To those promoting a “mandatory choice” system, consider: There are a very large number of people right now who have not expressed their wishes. This seems to imply that, for those people, the bother of going through the paperwork to express their wishes outweighs the wishes themselves. If you go to a “mandatory choice” system, then you’re forcing all of those people to go through the paperwork, an outcome that they manifestly do not prefer, since they haven’t already chosen it.
An opt-in or an opt-out system, either one, will go against what at least some of those people want. But a mandatory-opt system will go against what all of them want, since apparently what they want most is to not have to worry about it at all.