Peter-Vincent Schuld

The circular economy in medicine? If it is up to the Dutch social-liberal party D66, the state threatens to take away the right of self-determination over one’s own body after your death. It doesn’t get any crazier than that.

It’s not that we don’t want someone who needs a donor organ to do so, on the contrary.
It has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with that.

But there is such a thing as the right to self-determination. If a potential donor has not explicitly indicated during his or her lifetime that his or her organs are eligible for donation after death, the government and society have to accept this and keep their fingers off the remains.

A mortal remains should never, ever fall prey to “mining activities” by medical professionals, no matter how good the intentions of the medical profession may be.

I am asking myself a hypothetical question, but one that is real. Let alone, I accidentally walk onto the road with my clumsy “harses” in a fit of “brains elsewhere”, I get hit by a truck and I die. What would I want?

Well, I know what I don’t want. I don’t want my organs to end up in the bodies of people I’d rather see disappear from the face of the earth today than tomorrow. No, not political correctness, because for me it does matter who gets what.

But what if a serial rapist, a murderer, someone who has committed persistent violent and property crimes, a Salafist or a terrorist suddenly needs a donor organ? In our society, everyone has the right to medical care. The legislation makes no distinction between who does and does not receive donor organs. It is possible to deliberate and decide on purely medical grounds.

But I also have something to say, and I do not want the aforementioned people of my own signature to receive anything from me.

Donor organs also go abroad via Eurotransplant, and that is good, very good even. For those who make their organs available without conditions, this must remain the case.

But I do not accept that my organs, if I happen not to have filled in a “statement of objection” for a while, should just become available. Death can occur at any second, death comes unexpectedly. Even if I were to have doubts, and I die during that period of doubt, my organs could already be claimed on the basis of the D66 bill. Over my dead body! My coffin is not a box of unusable parts.