This Note examines, in three parts, presumed consent laws as they pertain to organ donation. Part I discusses presumed consent and explains the salient features of presumed consent laws. It then discusses case law that addresses the aftermath of unauthorized organ or tissue harvesting. Part II evaluates the United States Supreme Court’s evolving conceptions of the rights of individual and famil...

The U.K. is short of organs for transplant. Presumed consent raises issues about mental capacity and language skills, and religious questions. There are concerns presumed consent could make doctors too quick to pronounce a patient dead.

The debate on whether to introduce the opting-out system is complex and involves various ethical, philosophical, psychological and legal issues. Different answers are given to questions such as “Who owns the body of the dead person? Does the State own the body of the deceased person or does the body belong to the next of kin? Should the decision whether or not to donate the organs of a dead rel...

The number of available organs for transplant each year falls woefully short of the number of patients in need of donated organs in the United States. While approval numbers are very high for organ donation, the number of registered donors is much smaller. A commonly proposed solution to increase the pool of organ donors is to replace the current explicit consent policy with a presumed consent ...

This paper defends an 'opt-out' scheme for organ procurement, by distinguishing this system from 'presumed consent' (which the author regards as an erroneous justification of it). It, first, stresses the moral importance of increasing the supply of organs and argues that making donation easier need not conflict with altruism. It then goes on to explore one way that donation can be increased, na...

The well-documented shortage of donated organs suggests that greater effort should be made to increase the number of individuals who decide to become potential donors. We examine the role of one factor: the no-action default for agreement. We first argue that such decisions are constructed in response to the question, and therefore influenced by the form of the question. We then describe resear...

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...

Current methods of obtaining consent for emergency neonatal research are flawed. They risk aggravating the distress of parents of preterm and other sick neonates. This distress, and the inevitable time constraints, compromise understanding and voluntariness, essential components of adequately informed consent. Current practice may be unjust in over-representing babies of more vulnerable and dep...