Donor Recruitment: Individual Rights on Health Care and the Feasibility of a Presumed Consent and a Required Request System

Abstract

The fear of commercialization in donor recruitment has been one motive for politicians in the Netherlands to devote attention to legislation for transplantation. More fundamentally, there is a need to clarify the sometimes conflicting interpretations of Articles 22 and 11 of the Dutch Constitution: Article 22 declares a right to health care, for instance, for patients on the waiting list for a kidney transplantation, and Article 11 states a right to physical integrity for everybody. These rights imply a certain level of protection of living and post mortem donors. The still growing importance of transplantation technologies in medical science demands a solution of the legal issues involved. However solutions of the legal issues can only be assessed from a medical/socio/psycho/legal analysis of the underlying reality. In this paper, donor scarcity in the Netherlands will be analyzed from an economic, a psychological, and a legal point of view.