Who owns your body when you die? If you’ve never considered this question it might surprise you to learn that,

It is an historic principle of English common law that there is no property in a dead body. No one owns the body of a person who has just died: “the only lawful possessor of a corpse is the earth.”

In practice we have grown accustomed to professionals in death taking possession of the body – medics to ease it on its way, undertakers to deal with its disposal. But the body as such does not ‘belong’ to anyone.

The subtle but significant change introduced in England on May 20 this year is that organ donation has changed to an ‘opt out system’. This means, unless you go onto the organ donation register and declare that you do not want your organs harvested following your death, the presumption is that they can be.

This means that the State has assumed a power over our bodies it has not previously held. Not content with controlling who we can have in our homes, banning physical contact, and criminalising acts of worship, the UK government has this year made a landgrab for our very anatomy.

Of course, the reasons for this change are meant to be benign: “On 20 May 2020, the law around organ donation in England was changed to help save and improve more lives.” And as is typical in our sentimental age, this change was fluffyfied by naming it ‘Max and Keira’s Law’. How could anyone be so heartless (sic) as to object to it? Who doesn’t want to save lives?

In reality, it’s not quite that straightforward. The way in which the balance between State power and personal autonomy is tilted by this change to the law is profound. It certainly tips us further along a slippery slope upon which it is not hard to imagine the State declaring its right to make other interventions in our bodies – for the collective good, of course.

Apart from the issues of whether the State has exceeded its rightful authority, organ donation is an issue Christians should think about. I’m sure there will be readers of Think who have themselves had life transformed as the result of organ donation, or have friends and family whose lives have been so transformed. I wouldn’t want to underplay the value of that gift. But, rather like whether we should use vaccines developed thanks to the use of tissues from aborted foetuses, or whether we should bury people rather than burn them, the fact that the questions raised are uncomfortable is not good reason for us to fail to ask them.

The reasons Christian’s might have doubts around organ donation are helpfully described in Gilbert Meilaender’s Bioethics. The body is not insignificant in Christian thought. Yes, our bodies are a ‘tent’ (2 Cor. 5:4) and so not ultimate. But they are also a ‘seed’ (1 Cor. 15:35-38) that will somehow spring to glorious new life in the resurrection. We do not look for the liberation of the soul from the body, but for resurrection life in which we shall enjoy ‘spiritual bodies’.

Meilaender argues,

If we learn to regard our bodies simply as collections of organs potentially useful to others (and available whenever our true inner self chooses to give them), we are in danger of losing any close connection between the person and the body.

The assumption that our organs should be harvestable is rooted in an industrialised, mechanical, view of the body rather than a Christian one. Meilaender describes how this is made evident in the way we define death. Previously the ceasing of ‘vital activity’ (the action of heart and lungs) was seen as determinative of death but since the late 60s we have moved to the definition of ‘brain death’. We have become so used to this definition we probably never think to question it, but it is problematic. The problem is that while brain function may have ceased the body itself can be kept alive until organs are harvested. As Meilaender observes, “We would be reluctant to bury a corpse until its heart had ceased to beat. We seem willing, therefore, to remove organs for transplant from a corpse before we would be willing to bury it.”

Meilaender goes on, “It has become clear that the thirst for transplantable organs is so strong that we are, in fact, tempted to redefine death in order to secure the ‘needed’ organs.” That is a dangerous place to find ourselves, with all kinds of potential implications further down the slippery slope. Is it unrealistic to imagine unscrupulous – even if well intentioned – medics ‘encouraging’ euthanasia in order to increase the supply of harvestable organs? Is it unimaginable that we will move towards organs being harvested before brain death, in order to ensure the freshest supply?

Before we get to that dystopic possibility we already have the reality that death is becoming increasingly high-tech rather than humane. The image of a dying patient being prepared on a surgical table for the moment their organs can be removed is an unsettling one. It is one that will become far more routine thanks to the legal change made on May 20th.

Meilaender concludes,

Only by supporting organ transplantation in ways that do not lose the meaning of the body as the place of our personal presence, in ways that preserve the possibility of a humane death, and in ways that do not imply that staying alive as long as possible always has moral trump, can we become people who give thanks for medical progress without worshipping it or placing their trust in it. In becoming such people, we may bear a different kind of life-giving witness to our world.

It is for these kinds of reasons that I have chosen to ‘opt out’ of the organ donation register. I appreciate the corollary to that is that if it should ever be ‘needed’, I should refuse the possibility of receiving a donated organ. Others may feel differently, but I don’t like the assertion of State power over my dead body and my conscience is not entirely easy about the whole process of organ donation. It feels to me that there are too many questions around the subject for which I cannot find satisfying answers. When the day comes, bury me whole, and entire, without government interference.