Recycling

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1667538]

Comments

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

"Opt-out" does not properly express my opinion.

A dead person is dead. If you return their liver to the family, nobody is going to eat it, or implant it, or make art with it. They're going to throw it away. So you give it to someone who IS going to do something useful with it.

[innerbrat]

Everyone wants their first choice to be the default, and for everyone else to have to make the effort to opt out. Still, I fall down on - organ donation actually benefits society, whereas obeying the burial traditions of the majority culture - frankly doesn't.

Any default that doesn't give a material benefit just seems to be privileging a culture's burial rights over other people's life.

I completely think that we should respect people's wishes about what happens to their body, but in the absence of those expressed wishes, I think we should use the principle of 'do the most good'.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

If they make it so you have to opt-out, I will do so on a point of principle. They will still have to ask my next to kin what I actually would like.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I can't decide. Rationally the latter makes a lot of sense, but emotionally/politically it'd cause a firestorm of reaction that might end up making transplants even tougher to get.

-- Steve doesn't agree with the "man is a rational animal" thesis, as man isn't terribly rational.

[wildeabandon.livejournal.com]

Whilst I think it should be opt out, that's with the caveat that doing so is made very easy, that its well publicised, and vulnerable people aren't accidentally taken advantage of. Also, that there isn't a deliberate attempt to attach stigma to opting out.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Everyone wants their first choice to be the default, and for everyone else to have to make the effort to opt out

It's possibly a little unfair to suggest it's about 'effort', though. For those who don't want their organs donated it may be a moral/cultural/religious thing, and it's understandable that they want what is their default moral code to also be society's default.

They're still, y'know. Wrong. But I don't think it's laziness.

[andrewducker]

All options are emotional. Some people value the lives of people who could be saved by transplants over the feelings of people who are upset over what will happen to their body after they are dead, others value things the other way around. But either way around it's based on emotion.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

My objection is the government assuming they own your body unless you assert otherwise. Because of this, they can fuck off.

[innerbrat]

I don't think that "not requiring an extra hoop to jump through" necessarily implies laziness. I want my organs donated, but the system makes it so hard in some ways (I ticked the box when I got my provisional driver's license, I joined the register once, I used to carry a card then lost it, my family know my wishes, but I don't know those wishes will be carried out) that I know part of my desire for the opt-out system is because I don't know how else I can make my wishes known.

I don't know, I thought 'not wanting to bend over backwards to ensure your wishes ar fulfilled' was a more charitable painting than 'wishes to enforce your cultural morays on everyone else in society'.

[innerbrat]

It's nice to have next of kin that can be trusted in this regard.

[andrewducker]

I can understand that objection, although I don't share it. I don't view my body as belonging to me, once I'm dead. While still alive, very much so.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

The government, it seems, disagrees and thinks it owns you.

[andrewducker]

I am not infrequently in disagreement with the government on a number of issues :->

[feorag.livejournal.com]

But in this case you agree you are their property.

[recycled-sales.livejournal.com]

I don't plan to die, and nobody is getting my organs!

[feorag.livejournal.com]

Going by relative longevity, by the time I die, I probably won't.

[andrewducker]

No, because I do not believe that my dead body is me.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

You won't actually be totally dead at the point they remove their organs. They'll just think your brain is, and that the rest of you will soon follow. If you were actually fully dead, the organs would be useless.

[pete stevens (from livejournal.com)]

I'd have thought that your body is owned by you until death. Then it should be owned by whoever you give it to in your will. If you're left intestate then just as we have a default will for posessions we're asserting a default will for your body. The only added constraint here is you have to make the decision much more quickly than your average lawyer.

I'd be tempted to make the first $amount of your estate automatically taxable at the highest rate unless you donate your organs. If you aren't going to contribute to society with your organs it's only fair that you contribute money instead.

[johncoxon.livejournal.com]

My dad's plan: pass a law to explicitly state that all people own their organs and may do what they want to do with them, and then include within that law provision for the organs to be taken by the state unless explicitly mentioned in the will.

[sageautumn.livejournal.com]

THIS!

I don't care if it's opt-in or opt-out, just make it EASY to do one or the other.

Like you, I've done all the hoops, and when it comes down to it? Noone's going to pay attention to any of them--they're going to ask my next-of-kin*... who at that moment is going to be dealing with being all sad and whatever over the fact that I died and (perhaps) have some misguided thing about keeping me whole** or making it not "hurt me" any more or... SOMETHING... point being, NOT at a stage where they should be making decisions, esp about something that--hey, I ALREADY made that decision.

*who is my husband, who will defer to my paternal family who raised me
**before I'm probably CREMATED, which makes it make even less damned sense

[innerbrat]

Then whoever is lumbered with the job of disposing of the physical waste you leave behind will just have to follow whatever the established default is.

[ladysisyphus.livejournal.com]

With the incredible history of scientific misconduct with regards to the bodies of the poor, immigrants, the 'mentally deficient', criminals, etc.? Hell no. Opt in only.

All it would take to throw the whole opt-out system into a mess would be one overeager surgeon's appropriating the organs of someone deemed incapable of consent; after all, you don't have long after death before you have to start moving organs around, or they'll be no good any longer, and that crush for time doesn't leave a lot of room for determining whether or not the person in question was capable of not opting out. Consider also the problems of persons who are in a country illegally and may not want to make themselves visible to the state by going through the procedure to opt out (or may not have the language/access to information to know that procedure exists in the first place), but still may have strong objections to having a deceased loved one's organ distribution.

Keep in mind I say this all as someone who used to have a car with a bumper sticker that read 'Recycle Yourself: Become an Organ Donor'. Solutions involve awareness and making donation status easier -- I had to go out of my way to get a flimsy DONOR sticker on my licence when I moved to PA, and if I hadn't asked, no one would have brought it up.

[lpetrazickis.livejournal.com]

Jurisdictions that switch from opt-in to opt-out tend to have donation rates jump from 10% to 90%. I'm pretty sure a big chunk of that is laziness or at best indecisiveness.

[sageautumn.livejournal.com]

.ponders. For the cultural/religious thing... add a ticky box on birth certificates... at which point you're opted out unless you opt yourself back in.

Churches do all sorts of paperwork stuff (I'm thinking marriages, but also confirmations and such), adding one when a child is born... I can't imagine it being a big deal*.

All that said... I'm not certain how you'd go about such a database, other than fingerprinting/identifying without card/marker children--heck everyone actually, which kinda makes me uneasy. (I realize there could, in theory, be a database for fingerprints/identifier that would not be linked to law enforcement... but that seems awfully "theory".)

*AFTER the "We shouldn't have to!" about the CHANGE in the system is over, I mean...