Wednesday, January 16, 2008


What brave new world is this?

Organs to be taken without consent.

At the moment I'm teaching a two week interim class on bioethics. We'd just watched the film Coma from the late 1970s, in which a hosptial has decided to put people into comas in order to harvest their organs (they're now brain dead, you see) for profit. After the film we discussed the current system, which assumes that the patient has to actively and explicitly express their desire to voluntarily donate their organs (or else relatives must express their consent). This new system turns that concept on its head.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/01/13/norgans113.xml

Thankfully a brave Church of England bishop has spoken out against the policy in a principled way. Ok, not really. . .his statement actually lacks any firm set of foundational principles.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;jsessionid=FJLNJRJZ4Y33RQFIQMFCFFWAVCBQYIV0?xml=/news/2008/01/14/norgans114.xml

As Victor Frankenstein comments in the Kenneth Branagh film version of the novel: "Raw materials, nothing more."

1 comment:

Unknown said...

This is exactly why socialism in all of its forms is both inhuman and anti-human. Brown must believe that if the Chinese and Spanish can do it, why should the English or any others object.
Thank you very much for posting this and alerting us all to just what will happen here if this years elections go a certain way.