When the donor dilemma becomes personal There's something of a hoohah going on over the Welsh Assembly's determination to get people to opt out of organ donation rather than opting in. The Bill is ready and it should be law (in Wales) by 2013. My opinion? First, if any of my family needed a kidney (90 per cent of organ donations are kidneys), I would donate one of mine if the medicos deemed it not too ropey. Second, if ever I am in the unhappy position of having to meet a member of the Donation Team at the deathbed of one of my close kin, I'll face it with as much composure as I can muster: "Take the kidneys, it was his/her wish, we'd talked about it many times, yes, signed, OK, now please go away." We're all grown-ups. We do have the discussions. Third, if one of my babies had died in hospital and someone had spoken the words "organ donation" in my hearing when I was 29 or 31, I would have sprung at them, howling, and bitten out their throat. Who could contemplate the thought of "harvesting" body parts from a child under five? Or even under 10? Not me. Who could even contemplate asking? Again not me, no way. However, you can't make laws out of individual opinion, can you? Especially not mine. I change my mind now and again and I cannot construct a philosophical argument to save my life. Down my way, there was widespread cheeriness and pleasure following the news that former champion jump jockey Richard Pitman had donated one of his (69-year-old) kidneys to an unknown patient at Oxford's Churchill Hospital. Altruistic donations to an unknown recipient are very rare. There have been fewer than 100 "non-directed" altruistic living kidney donations in this country. Sixty-nine isn't too old for a kidney, my godson, Henry, tells me. He has had two kidney transplants because of Dent's disease (it's very rare, numbers in the low hundreds), which causes kidneys to calcify. His first kidney was donated to him by his pa. He was 17, had been on dialysis for nearly a year and was about to take A-levels. To watch someone you know, as a teenager, steadily taking on the colour and general floppiness of a Marigold washing-up glove is troubling. If it's someone you gazed at as he lay, wired up, in an ICU box as a premature baby, then thankfully embraced as a chubby baby, you can feel their pain (if you'll forgive the Clintonism). After four years, the kidney failed and he went "on the list" again. Along with 7,000 other people. His second transplant was donated to him in 2010 via a friend. It was an altruistic donation, like Richard Pitman's, and one can only marvel at it. I say "via" not "from" a friend, because he and Henry were what kidney circles call an "incompatible couple." There's a scheme called "paired donation" where incompatible couples swap donated kidneys around (or pooled donation: there can be three-kidney swaps as well as pairs). Henry was in need of a kidney at the same time as a man from the north of England, whose wife had offered hers. The tests done by Guy's meant that Henry got hers, not his friend's. He was on The Moral Maze recently to say that he favoured a "soft opt-out policy, with caveats." He was leapt on by both Melanie Phillips and Claire Fox for perceived softness and caveats. Fox asked him: "Are you not avoiding the obvious way to increase the number of organs, which is the act of persuasion? By morally motivating your fellow-citizens? Blimey, Claire - he has a bloody go! Henry is extra-keen to have more people know more about kidney failure and kidney donation. He ran events at school and at Exeter to raise a) money and b) awareness, because "what most people don't know is that a transplanted kidney only lasts so long (10 to 15 years) " and also that kidney research is lamentably underfunded. He is a racing man, Henry. Look him up on KidneyresearchUK.org. He's the fundraising manager for Richard Pitman's charity syndicate.