A Stitch in Haste

NOTE: See Update below.

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"If the rich could hire others to die for them, then we the poor would all make a nice living."
--Fiddler on the Roof

I'm not sure what to make of this bizarre story from Holland in which a kidney has become a game show prize:

A Dutch TV station says it will go ahead with a programme in which a terminally ill woman selects one of three patients to receive her kidneys.

Political parties have called for The Big Donor Show to be scrapped, but broadcaster BNN says it will highlight the country's shortage of organ donors.
...
"The scenario portrayed in this programme is ethically totally unacceptable," said Professor John Feehally, who has just ended his term as president of the UK's Renal Association. "The show will not further understanding of transplants," he added. "Instead it will cause confusion and anxiety."
...
"You can have a discussion about if this is distasteful, but finally we have a public debate," [a Dutch politician] told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

One can draw either of two conclusions from these events:

1. At least there are still some people who recognize the solemnity of the organ shortage, and that not everything belongs on reality TV.

2. On the other hand, if there is so much disgust and outrage over this version of circumventing the status quo, then what chance is there for a sober, non-Simon-Cowell discussion about a less tawdry but no less market-based system of buying and selling organs (which, gasp all you want, would greatly alleviate if not completely eliminate the organ shortage)? This is especially true with kidneys: risky as organ transplant surgery may be, the simple medical truth is that people can donate a single kidney in a way that they cannot donate hearts, lungs, livers and corneas. Why should they not be allowed to do so, and to be paid for their efforts?

If we allowed a "crass" free market for blood rather than insisting upon a "noble"(*) voluntary donation regime, then — crass or not — we wouldn't have a blood shortage. If we allowed a free, or even a semi-free, market for kidneys, then although we might all be less "noble," at least some of us would also be less dead.

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(*) Obligatory link to my posts on the gay blood ban.

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UPDATE: The show was a willful, deliberate, premeditated hoax staged by the Dutch network BNN, supposedly to "shock" the Dutch government, and the Dutch people, into action regarding that country's -- and I suppose all of Europe's -- organ shortage. On that, my thoughts above are unchanged.

As for the use of the hoax scheme, some hasty stitches:

1. To the extent that one buys into the view that broadcast media are not "owned" but "held in trust for the public," then BNN clearly betrayed that trust. One wonders how the FCC would have responded had this been perpetrated by a U.S. broadcast network. (The Dutch cabinet expressly rejected calls to block the program as impermissible censorship. Good for them.)

2. I wonder what the fall-out from BNN's advertisers will be.

3. Is it really the purpose of television to lecture its viewers, or just to entertain them? We already have an excess of activist legislators. Do we really need activist network executives as well?