We’ve Come For Your Liver
In what seems to be a scene straight out of Monty Python, hell, in what is a scene straight out of Monty Python, the UK Government has decided that they can take your organs with out your consent
Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to take organs from dead patients without explicit consent.
Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, the Prime Minister says that such a facility would save thousands of lives and that he hopes such a system can start this year.
The proposals would mean consent for organ donation after death would be automatically presumed, unless individuals had opted out of the national register or family members objected.
Now that’s bad enough, but they are going even further: they are going to pressure hospitals to come up with ever larger numbers of “donors”
The Government will launch an overhaul of the system next week, which will put pressure on doctors and nurses to identify more “potential organ donors” from dying patients. Hospitals will be rated for the number of deceased patients they “convert” into donors and doctors will be expected to identify potential donors earlier and alert donor co-ordinators as patients approach death.
The outcome of this is clear: since it costs far more money to keep patients alive the UK system will devolve into little more than an organ farm. Hey, why waste time and money prolonging your life when they’ve got that back-log of transplants to attend to? Heck, the medicines they give you to cure whatever ails you might in fact harm some of your organs, and the hospitals do have their quotas to meet!
“A system of this kind seems to have the potential to close the aching gap between the potential benefits of transplant surgery in the UK and the limits imposed by our current system of consent,” Mr Brown writes.
Yes, allowing people to decide how their bodies are used is so limiting, isn’t it, Gordo? Such an archaic concept like “consent of the governed” is so limiting when you, the big happy friendly government want to “help” people, isn’t it?
Oh, but this is a policy from the Labour Party, so it can’t possibly be bad, right?
Morality, Nanny State | tree hugging sister | 
January 14, 2008 1:36 pm
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“All Your Organs Are Belong to Us”
“Not having a leg to stand on” takes on a whole new meaning.
Frightening.
Like Bingley’s got a thing to worry about with HIS liver…
“…with a nice Chianti…”
Well, they can run off “Property of the Labour Party” sweats and tees… or save time by tattooing it right on the bodies in question.
Wankers.
That should be “Property of the Party”, nightfly. Just so there’s no confusion.
In the Army, when we got our first ID Card the line we got was “That ‘Property of the U.S. Government’ doesn’t mean the card, it means YOU!”.
Maybe the Brits will start putting that on their licenses.