Organ Grinder

Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, has written an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph announcing his support for organ donation without consent. Or, rather, “implied consent,” meaning that patients and their legal representatives will have to register their refusal to donate, via some as-yet-unspecified system.

On the blog Instapundit , Glenn Reynolds points to the old skit, ” Live Organ Transplants ,” from Monty Python—in which “But I’m still using it” proves an insufficient excuse for the signer of a liver-donor card. A more sophisticated response can be found in ” Second Thoughts About Body Parts ,” a classic essay by Gilbert Meilaender in the April 1996 issue of First Things .

But it’s the slide here, in Gordon Brown’s casual assumption of the moral high ground, that actually needs noticing: from explicit consent to implied consent, and, within sight, the refusal to allow anyone to opt out. The pressure from hospitals is already strong. When British hospitals were caught using children’s organs without permission, their response was that it was just bureaucratic paperwork they had failed at. Besides, taking those organs for research was so obviously the right thing to do that no one but a troglodyte would have refused—and why should they bother with the feelings of troglodytes?

That declaration of moral superiority is hard to take. It’s of a piece with the human-rights commissions in Canada that are out after the publisher Ezra Levant and the writer Mark Steyn for daring to have incorrect political views. It’s an assumption that the role of government is unlimited and its property rights reach even into the body’s organs.

The conflict of interest inherent in all this—when you go enter England’s state-run medical system, there will be some doctors who want to keep you alive and some doctors who want you dead as quickly as possible—is the least of it. Perhaps we should all be in favor of organ donation. But these are people who no longer trust manners and morals to do what they want, and so they have summoned the law to enforce their bidding. “We must beware,” as Gilbert Meilaender wrote in ” Second Thoughts About Body Parts ,” “the tyranny of the possible —the pressure to suppose that we are obligated to do whatever we are able to do.”