The city does it with your recycling. There have been cases where homeless folks have been popped for taking cans out of the recycle bin. The cities claimed that the homeowner transferred rights to those cans to them by putting them in city bins and then abandoning them. Now, take your body, which is trash once you are gone if you don't donate, or recyclables if you do donate. What we are dealing with is a question of presumptive ownership of abandoned property minus a declaration stating a desire to donate or not. An easy simile is found in probate law. Absent a will, property above a certain value is placed in trust with the state until all claimants are heard. Same here. If you want to donate, do nothing. If you don't opt out. The state is no more taking liberties here than they are with trash policy or probate law.
FQ13
In Minnesota and many other states you are wrong! There is an extensive list of kinship that is followed, and the state does not get involved until that list is exhausted. And by the way, the funeral home is actually on that list in many jurisdictions, so you will rarely see the state involved in most cases.
You need to remove the household garbage and recycling from your arguments. The human body and "trash and recycling" are not even in the same book. The dead human body carries many values, the highest being that of having housed the person that used it for a life time, and on a commercial value for its still viable parts for sale and purchase to and by those in need to extend their earthly lives. I say commercial value because the organ donation industry is a multi-billion dollar business. Nobody had the right to take tissue from a dead human body without the express permission of the user of that body or the legal next of kin in absence of a directive by the user. If this is going to be legislated it must be an opt in which will leave the full choice in the hands of the person of highest interest - the body user.
This legislation is being pushed by the tissue industry, and it is a very politically charged issue because it has a political feel good emotion attached to it. In Minnesota, South Dakota, Iowa, and I believe Wisconsin, the first legislation came in that required health care workers to present tissue donation options to any family who had a family member die in a health care setting. They did not get the increase in donors they wanted, so they passed legislation that requires health care facilities to contact a tissue donation business, and the business contacts the family. They are still not getting the response they want, so now they are pushing to turn us all into donors whether we like it or not.