Öz
Organ transplantation is a socially, legally, and ethically controversial subject. On the one hand lies the recipients’ right to health and the superior purpose, and the donors’ personality and health rights on the other. Organ transplantation intertwines ethics, medicine, and law; involving not only therapeutic objectives and evidence-based medical result expectations of donors and recipients but also their personality rights. Regardless of whether the donor is alive or not, there are three main models for organ procurement, namely explicit consent, presumed consent, and conscription models. In Turkey, the explicit consent model is used. The legal basis of the model is the Act on the Harvesting, Storage, Grafting, and Transplantation of Organs and Tissue. According to the Act, "Unless a testament with a contrary intention is presented, tissues such as cornea that do not cause any alteration to the appearance of the body when removed can be harvested." Clearly, the second paragraph of Article 14 refers to a distinct tissue but also indicates an expansion through the usage of a preposition that expresses similarity. If this expansion is not kept limited to tissues, it becomes possible to use all biological structures that can be harvested through natural body openings for transplantation based on the presumed consent model. Presently, there is no published study that we know of regarding the definition of the phrase “not altering the appearance of the body.” The goal of the article is to discuss the issues that arise from the ambiguity in the Act and to extend the interpretation of the Act by concretizing the phrase “not altering the appearance of the body” along with the cases where the handling of the issue, namely, keeping it specific to the cornea, is rendered functionless, and incompatible with the enactment purpose of the Act and the relevant legal norm.