"The question of organ procurement: beyond charity": "Conditional societal appropriation of body parts"

Henri Kreis, MD, Faculty of Medicine, Paris-Descartes, Department of Transplantation, Hôpital Necker, Paris, France :
==> "The question of organ procurement: beyond charity", May 2005 (read)

Source:
http://ndt.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/20/7/1303

In Rotterdam in 2007, during the congress "Organ Transplantation: Ethical,
Legal and Psychological Aspects", Henri Kreis, MD, presented a text
regarding "conditional societal appropriation of body parts": "Whose Organs are they, anyway?"

"Societal conditional appropriation of body parts could well be the best answer to society needs along with the respect of individual autonomy. Society becoming the owner of the corpse, but respecting the autonomy of the person, might be the real answer to all major questions raised today: organ procurement, organ allocation, organ trade, consent, and family involvement. (...) [I]n order to acknowledge the principle of autonomy, a society willing to use the concept of appropriation to favor organ procurement, should accept individual, but not family, refusal to donate, making this appropriation conditional to individual refusal. Decision will derive from a societal imbalance between individual and collective liberty. It is a true societal choice.

Currently, in view of other public responses, there is little reason to believe that this concept would be easy to introduce politically, prior to society becoming fully informed and accepting its benefits. The ‘goodwill’ pathway, however, appears to have reached a dead end. Replacement medicine may not survive if we continue to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. Let us keep asking our societies these difficult questions, and hopefully this will generate appropriate responses, even if the process takes some time."

==> Read the whole text: click.
==> French version / Version française : click.