Welcome. This is Anastasia Yuglova bringing you the Cato Daily Podcast.

Be sure to log on to our website W.W. dot Kato.org for a full archive of our

podcast as well as many other audio offerings.

The President's Council on Bioethics will meet this Friday morning to discuss their working

paper on organ procurement.

One of the issues that they will be considering is presumed consent for organ donation,

a controversial policy of naming every person an organ donor unless he or she specifically opt

out.

Director of Bioethics Research, Seagrid Freire-Vere, explains why this policy would be misguided.

What is presumed consent for organ donation?

The best way to explain presumed consent is to explain what it is not and what the system is like now.

What we have now is called Express Consent.

And what that means is you have to actually ask someone whether or not they want to consent to having their organs

taken for donation and they have to expressly say yes.

So you can say yes by having an organ donor card or an advanced directive and if you don't have those

you can talk to your family and then your family can say yes or no.

What presumed consent is is

It's sort of the flip side of that in express consent

You're assumed to own your own body and to be able to say yes or no about it. In presumed consent society is assumed to own your body and you have to take an active role to say no to an organ donation if that's what you want.

For example, in Australia, they will take your organs even if your family says no,

they will take your organs even if you said no.

The only way they won't take your organs is if you filled out the proper form

...