Organ Grinding
A favorite pet peeve among many libertarians, myself included, is the silly (and lethal) proscription against selling one’s organs. It’s “degrading” and “dehumanizing,” we are told. It “exploits” the poor, who would get “cheated” by the medical equivalent of loan sharks, in the same way that they are “exploited” by credit card companies and check-cashing offices and H&R Block. It would spawn a new era of medical mercantilism, as we “harvested” organ “resources” from third-world countries only to resell value-added services back to them.
While people around the world, often children, suffer and die. This is somehow a “principled” practice?
At least organ donation is still voluntary, although there is a perpetual shaming moral suasion campaign by the medical community (and the government) to pressure educate people about the desperate need for body parts and tissues (and again, why exactly is the need so desperate?).
Oops, did I say “still voluntary“?
A private member’s bill proposing presumed consent for all organ donations is churning up debate in Ontario.
New Democrat Peter Kormos … says he wants to make it so organs are automatically donated for transplant unless the patient specifies otherwise.
He says the bill is necessary because too many people die while awaiting transplants.
Response to the idea by both legislative members and the public is mixed.
I’d like to propose a compromise: Allow a switch from opt-in to opt-out organ donation, but with a payment. If you die without having gone through the bureaucratic hoops of refusing consent, then yes indeed the government could harvest your body parts, but only after paying your estate some reasonable amount — say $25,000.
That should cover all the bases. Organ donation skyrockets, the right to one’s post-mortem bodily integrity is preserved, no one is “exploited” and no one is allowed to “cheapen themselves” by selling their organs while still alive.
That might be a good first step toward eroding this obsolete, Victorian worldview that refuses to accept organ donation for what it is — a market.
That’s my ruling — any dissents?
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I like Ontario's idea, just take the decision out of the individual's hands once they're dead. At death, individual rights (as to a body, anyway) should cease since that body no longer posesses any semblence of freedom to act one way or another any more, it's just a lump of decaying goo. If society can make use of what's left of that body before it turns to dust (nicer term than goo, I guess) then we might have come up with one one of those rare instances of a useful thing a government can do with the tax money it collects.
[Kip replies: So does that mean that all wills are summarily void, because the testator is now "just a lump of decaying goo"?]
Shouldn't wills govern distribution of assets and property but a body be considered something else? I'm no lawyer so help me here – what happens if we look at a dead body as an outstanding liability left at death? The Ontario proposal presumes that, as a society, we want to "pay off" that liability by making productive use of whatever assets are left from it that we can, as long as one's will or living declaration does not specifically say not to. Your proposal seems to be based on the same assumption, I just don't see why one's estate should get paid for the work others are doing to pay off it's "debts".
If you die without having gone through the bureaucratic hoops of refusing consent, then yes indeed the government could harvest your body parts, but only after paying your estate some reasonable amount — say $25,000.
Sounds like eminent domain (sorta).
Kip,
An opt-out plan could be as simple to opt-out of as it currently is to opt-in. You could just need to carry a card that says "I do not want to donate my organs" with your signature and that of two witnesses and the date. You could use any ol' piece of paper you have lying around for a 'card'. No bureaucratic hoops to jump through, just two minutes out of your entire life. I can only hope that those too lazy to opt-in now would also be too lazy to opt-out later.
I'd prefer the statement to opt-out be laid out in the law, something that would give signers pause. Maybe "I value the sanctity of my dead body over the lives of several human beings".
carry a card? If a person, religious and his/her religion specifically prohibits him from getting carved up "donating"…
so say this person gets in the horric accident where her card or piece of paper can be lost or stolen (robbery) so that person does not get into heaven just because some half baked nurse at 3am did not find a card on him?
stop smoking whatever NDP is doping out, communist state indeed
I've often wondered about requiring organ recipients to be organ donors…
In other words, if you are not commited to donating your own organs, you are not entitled to receive someone else's.
That might be just the incentive needed to get folks to opt-in.
Are You Using that Kidney?
In my short, adult life, I have seen us take the first tentative steps down every slippery slope he imagined. Again I ask, why do we never listen to our smartest citizens?
[...] meanwhile, it is still apparently irredeemably monstrous to even discuss the notion of competent consenting adults selling their organs in a private market. Go [...]