Abstract
The present worldwide shortage of organs is not due simply to a lack of potential donors, but also to a failure to turn many potential donors into actual donors. At least part of this failure can be traced to problems with the two major systems presently used for obtaining consent for cadaveric organ donation: 'opting-in' and 'opting-out'. Mandated choice has been proposed as an alternative system for obtaining consent designed to combine the benefits of its predecessors while avoiding their shortcomings. Under this proposal, all adults would be required to decide for themselves whether or not they wish to become organ donors upon their deaths and their decisions would be controlling. This approach would preserve altruism and voluntarism while eliminating the need to obtain family consent, which is a major barrier to organ retrieval. To see if the public would support mandated choice, I contracted the Gallup Organization to poll 1000 randomly selected U.S. adults regarding this proposal. Nearly two-thirds of respondents said they would support such a system and three-quarters believe that the family should not be able to override their loved one's wishes. Mandated choice appears to be an acceptable method for obtaining consent for donation which, by eliminating the family consent barrier, might well increase the supply of organs available for transplantation.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 525-528 |
| Number of pages | 4 |
| Journal | Clinical Transplantation |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| State | Published - 1993 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Organ donation