And like Red China there could be no way a program like this would lead to wide spread human rights violations, like the state executing people for the express purpose of harvesting their organs.

From The Telegraph:

Gordon Brown has thrown his weight behind a move to allow hospitals to take organs from dead patients without explicit consent.

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph,the Prime Minister says that such a facility would save thousands of lives and that he hopes such a system can start this year.

The proposals would mean consent for organ donation after death would be automatically presumed, unless individuals had opted out of the national register or family members objected.

But patients’ groups said that they were “totally opposed” to Mr Brown’s plan, saying that it would take away patients’ rights over their own bodies.

Distasteful especially in how it ignores civilized norms of respecting the wishes of the dead, but the plan gets worse:

The Government will launch an overhaul of the system next week, which will put pressure on doctors and nurses to identify more “potential organ donors” from dying patients. Hospitals will be rated for the number of deceased patients they “convert” into donors and doctors will be expected to identify potential donors earlier and alert donor co-ordinators as patients approach death.

Meaning that as you go in for critical care, doctors will be under pressure to reach a certain goal of the fresh organ quota. Co-ordinators will be pressured to “convert” you to a donor. Sounds comforting.

Patient’s rights groups are appalled of course, as anyone should be, but it is this passage that I find most concerning:

While polls show 90 per cent of Britons are in favour of organ donation, 40 per cent of relatives refuse consent for the organs of their relatives to be donated, a figure which rises to 75 per cent among black and ethnic minorities. To solve this, the organ taskforce plans measures to boost donation, including putting pressure on doctors to identify patients as potential donors before they have died.

First off why is there a distinction between Black and ethnic minorities? Irrelevant to the story but indicative of the wide spread disenfranchisement of Blacks in England as the White establishment increasingly caters to a racist sub-group (East Asian Muslims) who share their disdain for Black people. That the journalist in this piece sees Blacks as different from all other ethnic minorities is troubling to say the least.

But what is worse is that the program moves to deny all those minorities the very same rights they claim they want them to have. It’s typical isn’t it? We have a country run by White liberals who will arrest a blogger speaking out about Islamic extremism on trumped up charges of racism, while plotting to ignore the valid religious and cultural objections of these same groups to having their bodies dismembered post mortum and divvied up amongst the favored patients of the bureaucrats who run the program.

That’s how it works in China, and to a lesser extent Spain which has a similar system. Organs are a commodity doled out to societal elites first. From the Human Rights Watch paper of Chinese organ harvesting:

While there are no statistics available detailing who the recipients of organ transplants are, the majority are probably mainland Chinese citizens. Government cadres, however, are reportedly given preferential status for organ procurement. Doctors at the Shenzhen People’s Armed Police Hospital told a former Intermediate Court judge that they would be particularly happy to accommodate his request to obtain a donated kidney for his brother, since they wanted the court to help in arranging a steady supply of executed prisoners’ organs.(80) And according to a recent investigative article in a Hong Kong magazine, hospitals usually make a special effort to meet expeditiously the needs of cadres requiring organ transplants:

In the senior cadre wards of high-level hospitals, organ needs are recorded promptly. Instructions from the [Party] leadership say that medical departments should naturally expend every possible effort to meet the needs of loyal servants of the revolution, and so organs from condemned prisoners are first of all reserved for their use. Long before the prisoner is executed…his or her health records, details of blood type and so forth will have been sent to the hospital, which then merely waits for the bullet being fired.(81)

Prompt organ transplant surgery is known to be widely available in China for high-paying foreign or overseas Chinese patients also. Patients are told exactly when they should arrive at the hospital, and the organs duly arrive on time. Quite how hospitals meet patient needs so quickly is a question with grave legal and medical ethics implications, for it would clearly suggest that execution dates are scheduled to conform with patient transplantation needs, rather than with the strict requirements of due legal process.

Are we to expect that a program set up by the socialist Labour party will not evolve into a similar system? Do you really believe that setting quotas for organ harvesting will have benign consequences?

We routinely see protests in England and here where Jews and Americans are accused of harvesting the organs minorities. The truth is that at this point we’re the only people who respect the dead enough not to treat them as a source for extra parts.

Hot Air takes a slightly different view.