It is immoral to require consent for cadaver organ donation.

n my opinion 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, the moral error of any concept of property in the body, and the quantitative failure of voluntary organ donation, I believe that the right of control over the cadaver should be vested in the state as representative of those who may benefit from organ donation. How one regards the dead human body, the cadaver, is in part governed by one's familiarity with it. At the present time, very few people ever see a cadaver which has not in some way been altered after death, and even fewer touch, handle, deal in any way with the dead human body. In developed countries, death itself most frequently occurs away from the home, in an institution, under the supervision of professional care-givers. For most people, ideas concerning the cadaver, its nature, the proper way to deal with it, are formed under these conditions. As a pathologist specialising in forensic pathology, for 50 years I have been at the other end of the spectrum of experience. In my daily work I have been privileged to examine the cadaver in all its stages after death from the immediate postmortem moments through all the stages of decomposition to bare bones. Working in a relatively small community, I have sometimes been charged with examining the body of someone I have known in life, which is never an easy task. These experiences have moulded my ideas as to what the cadaver is, what it represents, and how it should be treated. My beliefs are by no means unique, but I believe the experience which has formed them is unusual and because of this, important. Reading the works of ethicists who pronounce upon these matters, I wonder how many of them have ever viewed and touched a human cadaver, or seen a decomposing body. Out of all this I have become what I understand is termed a dichotomist, one who believes that the body and soul are separate, different entities. I use the term " soul " …