Bishops’ conference supports organ donations

THE CATHOLIC Church in England and Wales has backed an ecumenical campaign encouraging blood and organ donation, writes Paul Wilkinson.

The Archbishop of Southwark, Peter Smith, said in a statement that blood and organ donation were acts of Christian generosity.

“In the words of Pope John Paul II, ‘We should rejoice that medicine, in its service of life, has found in organ transplantation a new way of serving the human family’,” he said.

The ethics of organ donation have recently been considered in a report by an international group of clinicians  and theologians, convened by the Anscombe Bioethics Centre in Oxford.

Professor David Jones, director of the centre, said: “In principle, organ donation is a great thing, but it must be voluntary and informed. There is a move towards presumed consent and that undermines the whole ethos of it being a gift. There are also technical issues – effectively how dead do you have to be to be dead? There are criteria which not everyone has equal confidence in.”