There’s a grim reason why Belgium has plenty of organ donors

A discussion between two medical ethicists on the Today programme this morning ended with them agreeing on one point: whether or not it is right to breed pigs so that their organs can be harvested for transplantation into humans (as the University of California is experimenting with), the first thing we should do in order to solve the shortage of donor organs is to move to a system of ‘presumed consent’, where the organs of dying patients are considered fair game for transplantation unless they have signed a form excluding this.

To leave the pigs for a moment, what is so ethical about presumed consent for human donors? In the Today discussion, Belgium was held up as an example of a country which had increased the availability of donor organs by moving to a system of presumed consent. But no mention was made of a more fundamental reason why Belgian surgeons have a more plentiful supply of organs available than do British surgeons: Belgian drivers kill more than twice as many people, per unit population, as do British ones.