I'm a student currently working on an Extended Qualification Project regarding the opt-out organ donation system, Max's Law, that will be passed in the UNITED KINGDOM in 2020. I am currently gathering information on what people's opinions are on the idea of the UNITED KINGDOM becoming an opt-out country for organ donations.
To provide some idea, Max's Law is a law named after a young boy named Max Johnson who was diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy and underwent a 9 hour heart transplant operation. This law changes the standard of UNITED KINGDOM's organ donations, rather than having to apply to have a donor card, an individual who does not wish to have their organs donated must explicitly opt out of it. As of current, those who agree to have their organs donated must indicate their intentions on the NHS Organ Donation Register, either that or the next of known kin must make the decision if the individual's wishes are unknown. However, Max's Law follows the idea of presumed consent in which those who have died are allowing their organs to be donated to those who are on the organ donation list.
It has been noted that an individual's faiths and beliefs are taken note of to ensure that their ideals and traditions are respected, including the exemption from presumed consent if the individual has a limited mental capacity or has lived in England for less than a year prior to their death.
I wanted to know your thoughts and opinions on this Law, if you think the UNITED KINGDOM shifting to an opt-out system if beneficial and if you see any negative consequences to this?
Written by
YMendozaEPQ
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The shortage of organs for transplant is a national tragedy, and if politics were a rational science, it would recognize that solving this problem is one of the major moral issues of our time. The suffering and mortality of people waiting for an organ transplant is not only massively costly for the nation, but also a massive source of misery for a growing segment of the population. For the state, in order to save human lives and reduce human suffering, to interfere with the interest of people in feeding their organs to cemetery worms represents the triumph of rationality and humanity over superstition and selfishness
I support the law. Lots of people don't get round to signing the organ donor register but would be willing to have their organs used, so presumed consent is better. The family still have the final say.
I strongly believe that the family should not have the final say, since their preference to bury priceless, life-saving organs in the cemetery should never be able to trump the desperate need of dying patients to save their lives with them. In effect the family is saying that it values its awareness that the relative's organs are rotting in the ground over the very life of someone else, and sometimes of many other people, if the deceased relative has donated several different organs. All law is the balancing of private versus public interests, and since we have to accept a set-back of our houses from the street for the city's road planning needs, obviously no one should have the right to kill other people for the supreme pleasure of knowing that life-saving organs are rotting in the ground. Since one interest is a hundred trillion times more important than the other, to put the lower interest first amounts to the most vicious discrimination imaginable. Does the family have the final say over the last will and testament of a deceased relative? Of course not, because the legal system respects the autonomy of testamentary capacity. The same principle should hold with respect to organs.
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