Flawed Assumptions: Ethical Problems With Proposed Presumed Consent Legislation

The impact of presumed consent legislation on cadaveric organ donation: a cross-country study.

In the U.S., Great Britain and in many other countries, the gap between the demand and the supply of human organs for transplantation is on the rise, despite the efforts of governments and health agencies to promote donor registration. In some countries of continental Europe, however, cadaveric organ procurement is based on the principle of presumed consent. Under presumed consent legislation, ...

Presumed consent: a problematic concept.

issue, that of the increasing shortage of kidneys available for transplantation worldwide (1). As a solution for India, Kaushik favours the introduction of the “presumed consent” system to allow retrieval of organs from recently deceased persons. In this system, unless an individual has specifically expressed, in writing, during her/his lifetime, that he/she is unwilling to donate an organ foll...

Does presumed consent save lives

One policy tool that could be deployed to increase organ donation rates is legislative defaults. Currently, there are two legislative regimes: “informed consent”, in which an explicit declaration makes the person a potential organ donor; and “presumed consent”, in which an explicit declaration is required for not being a potential donor. In this study, we examine how an institutional setting, n...

Arguments against helmet legislation are flawed.

Correspondence: Flawed assumptions compromise water yield assessment

In their recent study, Zhou et al.1 (hereafter Z15) aim at mapping global patterns of the relative contributions of climate and landcover change on the water yield coefficient. However, implicit and not discussed assumptions on ‘typical changes’ of the considered forcing factors2,3 raise questions on the physical integrity of substantial aspects of their analysis4. In fact, we show here that ce...