H. E. Emson, It Is Immoral to Require Consent for Cadaver Organ Donation.

• Position: Abstracts

29 J. MED. ETHICS 125 (2003).

The author believes that any concept of property in the human body either during life or after death is biologically inaccurate and morally wrong. The body should be regarded as on loan to the individual from the biomass, to which the cadaver will inevitably return. Development of immunosuppressive drugs has resulted in the cadaver becoming a unique and invaluable resource to those who will benefit from organ donation. Faced with the biological reality of death, the moral error of any concept of property in the body, and the quantitative failure of voluntary organ donation, the right of control over the cadaver should be vested in the state as representative of those who may benefit from organ donation.

The individual has a right to bodily inviolability during life; integrity of the body is a necessary part of integrity of the person, together with the individual freedoms that are commonly stated in charters of rights and the like. But there should be no right of the person to govern disposal of his or her body after death, when separation of body and soul is irrevocably complete, and the individual is incapable of reconstitution. The person no longer exists, the soul has departed, and the individual who was but is no longer has no further use for the body which has been part of him or her during life. The concept of the right of the person to determine before death, the disposal of their body after death, made sense only when there was no continuing use for that body; it makes neither...