Summary
The Human Tissue Act 1961
2. The clinician's obligation
under Section 1 (2) of the HTA is to ascertain if, having made such
reasonable enquiry as may be practicable, he has no reason to believe
that any surviving relatives of a deceased child object to the body
being used for therapeutic purposes, medical education or research.
The starting point must be that the clinicians do have reason to
believe that parents might object. The scope of the inquiry must
be such that at the end of it the clinician can truly say he has
no reason to believe that there might be objection.
3. There is abundant evidence
of failure on the part of clinicians to make the requisite enquiries
of parents to see if they objected. There is no evidence that the
medical profession ever attempted to construe the HTA. Even now,
we are told that these matters are not dealt with at any stage in
the process of medical education and training. However, clinicians
did acknowledge in evidence the difficulties in reconciling their
‘paternalistic attitude’ to the wording of the HTA. They
conceded that parents should have been asked, for instance, about
retention of hearts. Consequently, the paternalistic attitude cannot
be sustained as an explanation for what has occurred. The bald fact
is that on the evidence the medical profession did not properly
consider the HTA in the first place.
4. The failure to comply with
the HTA and the enormity of what happened in the eyes of parents
in the van Velzen years can be summed up in the following question:
‘Would any parent not have objected if told that
every organ of their child would be taken and in most cases left
untouched for years without even an attempt at clinical histological
examination’
