This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, January 15th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is now behind a proposal to change Britain's organ

donation policy from a system in which Brits must opt in to one where Brits will have to opt

out. That's to keep their organs from being harvested by the government.

Sigrid Fry Revere, the Cato Institute's Director of Bioethic Studies, offers her take. For millennia, bodies of the recently deceased have really had no value to anyone other than the family members who were

interested in the bodies for the sake of mourning and for the sake of proper burial.

And in recent history,

corpses began to take on value for medical experimentation

and most recently in the last 20 to 30 years really only

they have taken on value for their organs so essentially they are-saving organs which are very much like gold in a

sense. And the question is who should they belong to? The family members who historically have had possession of bodies and organs

after death for burial rights and religious rituals, to the individual, him or herself, or to the individual him or herself or to the community or to the state for the

use of people who need them and presumed consent puts essentially ownership in the hands of the state of those three choices.

And the question is, is that the right answer to solving the organ shortage, which by the way we have an organ shortage because in most

countries Iran is the only exception it is against the law to sell body parts.

You said Iran is the only exception?

Iran is the only exception.

And Iran has not had a waiting list for organs for 10 years.

While in this country we've got nearly 10,

I mean nearly 100,000 people waiting for organs.

Now currently in Britain, as in the United States, organ donation is an opt-in process.

That is, we in the United States, we sign the back of our driver's license and we become organ donors.

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