Dear All
To get through life, you need all your body parts and preferably in good condition.
I spoke out against the idea of presumed consent for organ donation because it is a violation of sovereignty of people’s bodies.
The State doesn’t own you when alive and they have certain no right to cannibalise you for body parts when you are dead.
As to presumed consent, I wrote a blog post as far back as Tuesday, September 1, 2009, my thoughts haven’t changed.
http://glasgowunihumanrights.blogspot.com/2009/09/gmc-wants-doctors-to-tell-people-they.html
In that post, the GMC was keen to get an organ harvesting programme; to that end they wanted to Doctors to ask dying patients if they wish to donate their organs under controversial new plans.
This raised the prospect that a doctor would simply stand back and watch you die to get your organs.
And if people think that wouldn’t happen then they are so naïve that they border on stupid.
In the latest twist to the harvesting programme, a researcher at Dundee University says people should be allowed to sell their kidneys.
Price recommended is £28,000 in an NHS-regulated organ market.
Writing in the British Medical Journal, Dr Sue Rabbitt Roff is calling on the health service to offer financial rewards to individuals willing to give up a kidney.
She sees this as a way of reducing cost to the NHS and allowing more transplants to take place.
The British Medical Association doesn’t support money being offered in exchange for kidneys and rightly so.
We cannot allow a NHS-regulated organ market, although taking body parts, they would be trading on the misery of the vulnerable and disadvantaged.
Dr Calum McKellar, director of the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics said:
“A legal, regulated market in human body parts would end up exploiting those who have very restrictive financial means, such as many students and foreigners.”
And the poor, he forgets the target population that this harvesting programme would be geared towards.
Dr Roff said:
“We already allow strangers to donate kidneys out of the goodness of their hearts. They get their costs covered, they don’t know who the recipient is, there’s no publicity, no public acknowledgement of what they do.
“We’ve moved away from the notion it has to be a family member or a close associate who can give you a kidney. We’ve already moved into the zone of allowing the general public to make good-hearted donations.
“What I’m suggesting is, why don’t we add money to this equation in order to increase the amount of provision which is there, because we’re behind the eight ball in terms of the number of kidneys that are needed in the community.”
There is a huge chasm between an act of goodwill and a NHS organ harvesting programme.
This would be seen by some as another example of the richest in society benefiting from the poorest.
If £28,000 is being paid out, it isn’t a leap to suggest that someone like Roff would further propose that those receiving the kidneys should pay the cost of acquisition.
In order to balance the books and take pressure off the NHS.
The road to a two tier health service will have begun.
An NHS-regulated organ market is a disgusting idea in the extreme, the NHS has the standing it has in the minds of the public because decades of goodwill has built up, the golden thread that runs through it and how it is seen to operate.
Any government that signs up to this doesn’t deserve to be in public office and deserves the contempt of the public.
Yours sincerely
George Laird
The Campaign for Human Rights at Glasgow University
