Anyone who has been remotely connected with the British civil service will understand that, unlike even the United States in an increasingly dwindling number of areas, there is no real sense of government serving the people. The government exists to manage the unwashed masses and knows what is good for you, even while every individual understands that the government is really serving itself. This notion of nanny leadership is even woven into the undergraduate experience at Oxford, where the nation's managers are bred (and probably Cambridge too): if you have any sense of egalitarianism, it is repulsive but difficult to ignore.

Property rights.

Your body is your most important piece of property. If the government can just go around "cavalierly" doing whatever it wants with your body, how can one say that they live in a just society?

It is rude.

It makes no difference when your dead if your organs are in a jar, cremated, or rotting in the earth.

Cool; so when someone close to you dies they wont mind if I come along and urinate on their body before the funeral? Given what you just wrote you wont object to that right?

It's about the living; and respect; doofus.

"Cool; so when someone close to you dies they wont mind if I come along and urinate on their body before the funeral?"

Not really. They're dead, why would I care?

"It's about the living; and respect; doofus."

The dead don't need their bodies any longer. If the living object, well, simply remind them they're talking about a dead body.

But these people are dead. If I'm dead, and the government removes organs from my body, then they're not violating MY rights, simply because *I* don't exist anymore. (You may disagree if you believe in the concept of an immortal soul, of course.)

There are certain protections that the living enjoy that should indeed be extended to the dead. For example, libel and slander are illegal when the victim is alive, but they should also be illegal for the recently-deceased (for a different reason: the point there is not to protect the person, but to protect society from falsehoods and lies.)

I actually agree that this is not acceptable on the part of the government, but "they can't take my organs because my organs belong to me" doesn't hold water if you're dead.

And I think that intent matters, too: for example, if the government had said "we need these organs because there's a shortage of donor organs, because people in hospitals are dying due to the lack of new kidneys, livers, hearts etc.", and if the government had been open about this... would it have been unacceptable, too? I think not; respecting the religious feelings of a dead guy is less important in my book than allowing someone else to live who would otherwise have died.

Maybe it makes no difference to you when you are dead, but a whole lot of people in this world have quite strong feelings about the right way to treat a persons body once they are deceased, and rational or not, those feelings are very real and should be respected.

To take what you said to the ridiculous, if one of your kids died and the doctor cut them into pieces, removed the contents of their head, and used it like a puppet, would you be upset? I would be, and upset is putting it very lightly.

With all due respect, I believe you are being dishonest for the sake of argumentation. Feelings towards loved ones don't just magically disappear at the moment of death.

Unless you don't have any feelings to begin with, which is still a possibility. By being a psychopath, for instance.

As much as it was a cabal of ghoulish bodysnatchers with God complexes who thought they were above the law. You know, typical medics. 99.5% of them give the rest a bad name.

And I re-iterate my position: if criminal acts were performed, individuals should be prosecuted. If the relatives are going to sue anyone for anything (what? emotional distress?) then it should be the individuals, not the State. The State doesn't care if it has to rob Peter a bit more to hush up Paul.

So to prevent people from illegaly using my dead body as an organ buffet, I have to register to let people legally use my dead body as an organ buffet?

Nice one.

So? Feelings for a person and feelings for their body are very different things. As I said in another post, I've had close friends die and I agree that the feelings that you have towards them don't just vanish, but transferring those feelings to an inanimate lump of dead flesh seems pretty sick to me. Those feelings belong to the memory of the person, not to the body that they left behind.

The very fact that the government doesn't just openly say "your organs become state property on your death" (and save hundreds of lives of people on transplant lists every year) should demonstrate that, despite your own feelings, there are sufficient people in society who disagree with you to prevent this happening. My own personal feeling is that if you can do some good for someone else after your death, why not, but I also respect other people's opinions differ.

IMHO the MPs, MePs, or regulators who have signatures on this policy to "harvest organs" should automatically receive a year in jailtime.

Otherwise, there is no motive to stop for current or future gov't functionaries from doing it again. "Sorry" is about as worthless as when the US said "sorry" to Americans democrat president FDR imprisoned during WW2. It is meaningless. There has to be punishment/consequences for their acts.

When did we start excusing governments and other authority figures from law? The US president is ordered to hand over emails, and he apologizes and "loses" them. The Catholic church is accused of covering up years of sexual child abuse, and the Pope apologizes. The British government steals organs and desecrates corpses, and someone apologizes.

How about giving these people the same consequences as if it was one of us "normal" people doing these acts? Are you trying to imply that we wouldn't have the full weight of the law fall on us? Are you saying we could get away with just saying "I'm sorry?". This has to stop, it's the path to despotism.

"How dare you take the organs out, they were supposed to feed the worms".

There may not be a good logical rationale to keep a dead body intact, but there are religious reasons.

For a religious person, a deceased body desecrated might mean a deceased soul spending eternity in hell as opposed to heaven. Which, in their believes, would be a very negative emotional situation.

I'm not religious, like many others on Slashdot, but that does not mean we get to decide how religious people should feel or what they should believe in, just like religious people shouldn't be allowed to tell others what to feel and believe. Even if we could, we wouldn't be very succesfull.

They violate the rights and feelings of your living family members.

I'm referring to empathy towards people experiencing loss. Just because you don't feel that the body deserves respect, (nor do I, I carry an organ donor card everywhere I go,) that does not mean that it is worthless to respect the wishes of others.