Lower house to vote on bills to revise transplant law next week+

TOKYO, June 9 Kyodo - Japan's lower house is set to hold a vote next week on four different bills to amend the contentious organ transplant law that have reinvigorated discussions on whether brain death should be recognized as legal death, lawmakers said
Tuesday.

Since the issue concerns personal views on life and death as well as ethical
values, most political parties are expected to put the upcoming voting beyond
partisan debate and allow each lawmaker to decide which amendment proposal to
vote for or against.
''I am fully aware of the importance of organ transplant,'' Prime Minister Taro
Aso told reporters in the evening. ''As it concerns human life... I would like
to take time to think about it before making a decision.''
At a news conference, Yukio Hatoyama, president of the main opposition
Democratic Party of Japan, expressed concern over the delay in enacting any of
the amendment bills and emphasized that ''some sort of a conclusion needs to be
reached during the current ordinary Diet session.''
The current Organ Transplant Law enacted in 1997 only allows for organ
transplants from people aged 15 or older, who declared their intention to
donate organs while alive and were determined brain dead. Agreement from family
members is also required.
Due to the strict legal restrictions, there have only been 81 cases of organ
transplants in Japan since the law was enacted, resulting in the trend of
patients traveling abroad for transplants.
The move toward revising the law has gained momentum since around April, when
speculation was rife that the World Health Organization would call on its
member nations to tighten measures against such trips at its general meeting
last month.
But the WHO decided to put off setting guidelines that would put a brake on
overseas organ transplants. Japanese lawmakers, however, have called for
continued efforts toward legal amendments to pave the way for more transplants
within the country.
In Tuesday's plenary session, Norihisa Tamura, chairman of the House of
Representatives' Committee on Health, Labor and Welfare, presented an interim
report on the four amendment proposals, ahead of next week's planned voting,
and the proponents of the bills made their cases.
One of the bills, Plan A, envisions the most radical change, advocating
recognizing brain death as legal death, removing the age limit and only
requiring agreement from family members even in the case that the donor's
intention is unclear.
Another one, Plan D, is almost similar to the existing law but proposes
conditionally lifting the age limit.
Taro Nakayama of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party who has proposed Plan A
told the lower house that many other countries have adopted regulations similar
to his proposal and that throwing out the age limit would ''clear the way for
organ transplants to performed on children (in Japan).''
Plan C prohibits those aged 15 or younger from donating organs and tightens the
terms of the brain-dead diagnosis, while Plan B proposes lowering the age limit
to over 12 with few other changes to the current law.
Plan C's proponent, Tomoko Abe of the Social Democratic Party, is opposed to
easing restrictions, arguing that no effective framework is in place to prevent
organs of children who died as a result of abuse from being transplanted.
Some lawmakers have also voiced concerns that debates are still not sufficient
on the complex issue. The committee ended their deliberations last week after
only holding two sessions in May and June.
In next week's plenary session, the lower house is expected to hold votes on
the four bills in the order of their respective submission date.
==Kyodo