Virginia Postrel explains just how easy it would be to end a huge amount of human suffering:
Since the current transplant system extols altruism, one way to end the
list would be to find more altruists. With, say, 50,000 new living
donors, deceased donation could easily pick up the slack. Again, the
numbers aren’t that big. The Southern Baptist Convention includes 42,000 member churches; the United Methodist Church, whose Web site
earlier this year featured the quote, “As United Methodists, we’re life
savers,” counts more than 34,000 U.S. congregations. If each
congregation produced just one new living donor, the waiting list would
disappear. But kidney donation is a more visceral mission than
mainstream religious groups want to contemplate. The only sect to adopt
kidney donation as a formal cause is a tiny Australia-based group
called Jesus Christians; instead of lauding them, critics point to
their donations as evidence that they’re a cult.
