Organ Donations-Should the Opt-in Policy be changed?

Organ Donations-Should the Opt-In Policy be changed?

There are 122,625 people on the waiting list for an organ donation and each day die 22 people die from lack of available transplants, (Volk). The supply of donors isn’t meeting the demand, and millions are suffering. Is there a way to possibly increase the number of donors?

One major example of this is the Opt-In policy that the US has. Currently, the Opt-In policy is that a donor has to state that he or she would like to be a donor, rather having an Opt-Out policy where the donor has to say he or she doesn’t want to be a donor.

One study done found that switching to an Opt-Out policy might increase the number of deceased donors, but may decrease the number of live donors, such as those found in kidney donations. Yet this study also concluded that switching to an Opt-out policy would still lead to overall increased donations from the deceased (Shepherd et al).  

When compared to nations with an opt-out system the U.S. has very low numbers of donors. A study in Austria was done, and it showed that “Austria, with an Opt-Out system, has 99.98% of the population consenting while the U.S. on an Opt-In system has 28% of the population consenting to donate, while when surveyed it appears about 85% of the U.S. population would want to be organ donors,” (Ahmad).  The study also found that there is a direct correlation between consent rates and effective donations. In a number of nations with Opt-Out policies, there is shorter waiting list for organs, (Ahmad). Though, some that do not want to donate might be marked as donors, due to the default effect, in which most will not put in the effort to change the default. For the most part, this policy would increase the number of donors and help to increase the number of transplants.

Is it ethically to do this though? Overall switching to this policy, still always someone the right to chose not to donate an organ. It shows that most likely the number of deceased organ donors would increase. I think this might be ethically solution that might be able to help save a number of lives.

References:

Ahmad, G., & Iftikhar, S. (2016). An Analysis of Organ Donation Policy in the United States. Rhode Island Medical Journal (2013), 99(5), 25-27.

Shepherd, Lee, et al. “An international comparison of deceased and living organ donation/Transplant rates in opt-in and opt-out systems: a panel study.” BMC Medicine, BioMed Central, 24 Sept. 2014, bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12916-014-0131-4.

Volk, Michael L. "Organ Quality as a Complicating Factor in Proposed Systems of Inducements for Organ Donation." Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 77, no. 3, 2014, pp. 337-345. EBSCOhost, doi:scholarship.law.duke.edu/lcp/all_issues.html.