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20% of the worlds prison population (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31999333

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[–] 8 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

Why would they phase that out? Once you are dead you don't need organs. I'm so happy to live in a country where you have to explicitly opt out of organ donation if you don't want to be a donor (many EU countries do it that way).

Every country where you have to opt in to be an organ donor has it completely backwards.

Update: ok maybe, I should have read the article

sometimes when patients are still alive

Ok that's fucked up

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    If its okay to harvest organs from prisoners without their consent, even after they're dead, then the state now has a vested interest in sending people to prison.

    There's some terrifying speculative fiction based upon this premise by Larry Niven:

    "The ultimate danger, when a citizen could live for as long as possible if enough organs were available? The cause of it all was the organ banks. With good doctors and a sufficient flow of material in the organ banks, any taxpayer could hope to live indefinitely. What voter would vote against eternal life? The death penalty was his immortality, and he would vote the death penalty for any crime at all."

    The story continues where the need for organs continues to rise and there aren't enough murders to harvest organs from. So lessor crimes are then promoted to the death penalty so that those prisoners organs can be harvested too. Eventually you get down to jaywalking being punishable by death so that others can live longer on your organs. Obviously there's a bit of creative license here in this fiction, but you can easy see where it can go in reality.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I see what you mean but that's not what I thought China did. I thought they just declared every prisoner automatically an organ donor which would totally be fine IMHO.

    I live in Europe (Austria) and the solitary-based health care system is amazing. Automatically declaring everybody a donor is the best thing you can do (in in that case there wouldn't even be a difference if you are a prisoner or not).

    If you ask me we should even get rid of the option to opt out unless in well founded court approved exceptions. Opting out of being an organ donor is probably the most egocentric, selfish thing one could do. You are dead and you still want to deny helping others at literally no additional cost for you.

    It also has practically the opposite effect of what you mentioned. If you only have a few organ donors and one is in a bad condition in a hospital there a probably a few people that hope they don't make it to get the organs. But if everybody is an organ donor the situation gets much simpler because there isn't this artificial scarcity.

    Long story short, I haven't heard a single good argument for not being an organ donor except that people could care less about the paper work to opt-in. That's why the European opt-out system is way better, but many US citizens probably would call that communism :-)

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