About halfway through a marathon session on Thursday, Germany's lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, re-opened a debate that had last closed six years ago: Should Germany bring itself in line with many other European countries and make organ donation an "opt-out" rather than an "opt-in" choice.
Germany's parliamentarians rejected the so-called "presumed consent" system in 2020, despite a push from the Health Ministry, and opted for a compromise where people would be asked when renewing their national ID cards whether they would like to become organ donors.
Now, an inter-party group of parliamentarians has launched a new push to bring presumed consent in, which was debated for two hours on Thursday. The parliamentarians want every German citizen to be considered an organ donor, unless they have expressly objected to the idea. How an organ transplant transformed this woman's lifeTo view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video
Most parliamentarians in favor of 'opt-out'
During Thursday's debate, the majority of speakers were in favor of the opt-out system. Gitta Connemann, parliamentarian for the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), said that all the measures taken to increase the number of organ donors — currently around 40% of the population — had been right, but had not been enough.
