Organ donation is meant to be a gift

THERE are 6,500 people waiting for a transplant in this country. Many will, tragically, die before an organ becomes available.

This week, the Government announced a public consultation on changing the rules around organ donation. It is proposed that there will be ‘presumed consent’, which would mean that everyone is entered on the organ donation register and that people have to actively opt out.

It makes me feel deeply uneasy that the Government feels at liberty to presume what I would want done with my body and that the wishes of families could be over-ridden. But perhaps most importantly, there’s no good evidence that the policy works.

Since Wales adopted an optout system two years ago, there has been no increase in donations. The same happened in Spain. For the first ten years after they introduced an optout policy, there was no rise in organ donations.

The thing that improved the numbers was introducing highly trained transplant teams who would meet with families to discuss donation and answer their questions. This is the way to do it.

But there is another dimension to this, too. The very fact that organ donation is a gift, and one that the loved ones are involved in, has real psychological benefits for grieving friends and family. While nothing will bring the person back, many have said to me how they feel it is what the person would have wanted, and there’s a sense that the family are involved in keeping their loved one’s memory alive.

But presumed consent strips all this away. It’s no longer a powerful and generous gift that brings families together, but an assumption by the State that it can do what it wants with your body.

That’s not a gift in any sense of the word.