If I ruled the world

If I ruled the world, recycling would be compulsory.

Not the kind done by the tut-tut-look-at-the-neighbours sort—piling up empty Evian bottles and bits of old orange peel, and making pledges to shower for ten minutes instead of 15 in the hope of offsetting the environmental damage caused by a gazillion farting cows, and the industrial gallop of China.

To hell with that lot. At best they can perhaps influence the possible fates of our hypothetical great-grandchildren. What I’m talking about is the sort of recycling that gives concrete benefits to real people here on earth today: people dying because their organs fail and there aren’t new ones to plumb in. Biological recycling: doing our civic duty by the meat economy.

This July alone, 12 patients in Britain died before a liver could be found or because they were too ill to have the operation. To keep up with demand, the chief medical officer has said, the number of people on the donor list needs to treble. Only 20 per cent of us have signed up, even though around three-quarters of us say in surveys that we’re willing to donate our organs.



How to solve the problem? The government has toyed with a system of “presumed consent”: you should be required to opt out, rather than opt in. Hardly radical, but you’d think the proposal was to kill babies by the reaction in some quarters. In the event, the prime minister unscrewed his political courage from the sticking post (it being easier, as the past few years have shown, to drum up support for taking lives than saving them) and settled for “never say never,” and a public awareness drive.

On 8th October, the BMA announced that the organ donation task force had produced a 7 per cent lift in donors signing up, but even if that reached 50 per cent over five years “people will still be dying waiting for an organ.”

If I ruled the world—and let’s be true to the terms of the question here, it is not a proposition that invites Rowan Williamsesque ruminations on liberal internationalism—organ donation wouldn’t be a donation at all. It would be compulsory.

Habeas corpus is a principle of unimpeachable excellence— but it ends at the grave. “Habeas corpse” is a phrase that makes sense in neither Latin nor English.

Freedom of conscience, religious fancy and personal squeamishness should count not one iota in the face of a single life prolonged. Wear your chador, drink the blood of your saviour, do whatever the hell you like while you’re alive. But after you’re dead, what happens to your body is none of your business.

If dying people—regardless of their religious beliefs or preferences—can live because we ignore your wish to decompose in toto, tough luck. You can curse us from wherever you end up, but my dictatorship is putting living people ahead of the dead.

Cuteness should not be a criterion. It’s easier to appeal on behalf of “dying children”—as opposed, say, to yellow-eyeballed alcoholics with cirrhotic livers poking through their shirts like the toes of winklepickers. But that’s to capitulate to the murderously childish sentimentality that leaves us with the case as it stands.

If I ruled the world we wouldn’t have to worry about making the choice. Donor organs wouldn’t be saved up just for the photogenic tots on their first and last visit to Disneyland. They wouldn’t need to be. We’d just haul another liver out of a motorcycle crash (“donor cyclists” is, as I understand it, one of the nicknames medics have for motorcyclists in any case) and pass it onto someone who’d appreciate it. Give them to the unrepentant alcoholics? Why not: let them enjoy another few benders.

Abundance is what we’re after. Let us harvest organs—and embrace the tabloid boo-word “harvest” while we’re about it. Let us equip traffic cops and pizza delivery boys alike with hand-held buzz saws and bags of chipped ice. Let us stockpile body parts for as yet unimagined operations, just in case.

Let us accumulate slithery mountains of pancreases, like drop scones kept warm under a tea-towel; let us stack pelvic girdles like supermarket trolleys; lungs like rails of shirts; ovaries like trays of hens’ eggs.

Freedom of conscience has its place. We will make exceptions. Why force a Jehovah’s Witness to accept a blood transfusion? It would be barbaric to force medical treatment on living people who don’t want it; just as it’s barbaric for the dead to withhold it from living people who do.

If you believe in the doctrine of the physical resurrection of the body, and rely for your eternal happiness in the afterlife on it, we can make accommodations.

If you think your kind and benevolent and all-wise God will turn you away from heaven at the last trump, despite a life of good works, because your kidneys went to save a life, or your fingernails were cut, post-mortem, to make you more presentable at your funeral, we’ll cut you a deal. We’ll re-gift every other part of you, but we’ll leave your brain.