Recycle me, please: what to do about a silent crisis in organ donation So an argument that looks like it's already been won clearly has distance to go yet. Doctors speak openly of a crisis. The Welsh Assembly proposes shifting to an "opt-out" scheme, whereby patients are automatically placed on the donor register, from as early as 2015. In Westminster, lobbyists have called for the same thing - and an organ sourcing taskforce is already in place ("hearts and minds" the unspoken motto). But why does government have to coax us into putting money where, apparently, our mouth already is? This isn't a scold. Up until yesterday evening I was part of the 76 per cent taking their organs to the grave as a nice bit of worm-feed. Probably the main reason I've signed up as donor by now (rather than, say, in two months' time) is the hypocrisy in badgering people to let surgeons dig out their hearts and kidneys while not contracted for the same. It's not that we lack inspirational stories. Just last week the family of a 14-year-old girl gave doctors the OK to transplant their daughter's organs the day she died from an asthma attack, an act of awful bravery that saved five other children. Those who argue against an 'opt-out' system often say that all donations should be like these parents' - a gift. But while people continue to die from a fixable organ shortfall, that effectively decrees our own sense of altruism is a trump-card. It shouldn't be. And there's another moral window to break here. Keeping a brain-dead body alive so doctors can harvest organs better is called "Elective ventilation," a piece of double-speak that disguises what is in truth a grisly, Frankenstinian process. Yet heebie-jeebies shouldn't stop this from being standard practice, either. After all, one thing religious and non-religious can agree on - nobody ever said the body lives for ever. So what better way to send off the spirit than helping to facilitate life? Systems are sluggish to change. In the meantime any organ carrier can take action. One reason people haven't already signed up en masse is that altruistic payback isn't incentive enough to jog them into what they assume will be a swathe of admin. In fact, the form itself is, for such a sombre matter, worryingly short. Ten clicks max and one can be recycled. In a world of social media campaigns that offer readers moral hits for simply adding their name to a petition, this clicks are that rare thing, a gesture that can give us real reason to be (briefly) proud of ourselves. Lying in bed the night after I'd glanced through the menu of organs I'd be happy to pass on, I heard my heart beat and felt alive.