20An amendment tabled by French MP Jean-Louis Touraine was adopted by the Social Affairs Commission of the French National Assembly, when the health law was examined on March 19, 2015. Previously having passed unnoticed, then voted during the night, this amendment aims at changing the Public Health Code regarding organ donation.
The amendment specifies that “The removal of organs may be carried out on an adult person provided that he/she has not made known his/her objection to such a removal while alive. This objection is to be expressed by entry on an automatic national register provided for this purpose. It is revocable at any time.” In the current Public Health Code this objection can be expressed “by any means”, not just entered on this specified register.
Organ removal will therefore officially concern all deceased persons if they have not previously made their objection explicit on the specified register.
This amendment also specifically aims at excluding families and relatives of the deceased from being consulted beforehand; their consent will no longer be necessary. The article only specifies that “those close to the deceased be informed of the planned organ removal and the purpose intended in this removal.”
The gift of organs is a form of solidarity that allows numerous lives to be saved each year. Even so, a shortage of organs should not cause us to depart from a strictly-regulated framework, insuring free consent (or at least non-objection), the planned therapeutic purpose, the control of the conditions of removal, in particular those of “donors in cardiac arrest” or from patients on whom it has been decided to stop treatment, since the removal of an organ must not be made to the detriment of caring due to incurably ill or very old persons.
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