Anyway, my thoughts on this...
Of course national and foreign media and politicians are tumbling over each other in their outcry, but I think BNN can manage to make this different than being the next Big Brother, one of our worst export products in history.
Bart de Graaff, TV host and founder of BNN, the public broadcast organisation that's going to host the show, had a chronic kidney disease and only lived to be around 35. At that age he still looked like a 12 year old boy, because the kidney disease had ceased his natural growing process. He had to wait for many years to receive a donor kidney, which only served him for a couple of years but eventually was rejected by his body and he died.
Now five years after his death, BNN are bringing the serious lack of organ donors in this country back to the national agenda. Of course it's very confrontational (
they have a reputation for that) and you can definitely argue whether this is in good taste; I personally think it's not.
But at least the issue is right at the centre of the political debate again and I do think it could lead to more people offering their organs up for donation after they die. Even I have never filled out a donor form, when I have thought about doing so several times. If I happen to die next week, would my parents know 100% sure what my thoughts are on organ donation? No, because at my age I'm not really planning my own funeral yet. Even when my uncle died some years ago after having fought against cancer for about a year, it was only during the very last few days that he decided he wanted to be an organ donor. He never got to sign the papers because he was already too weak for that, but his verbal agreement with us and the doctor in the end was sufficient. The cancer hadn't left a single organ in his body useful for donation, but at least the cornea of his eyes have been succesfully transplanted onto someone else. Why don't we offer our organs up for donation more often? I'm pretty sure the majority of Dutch people who are calling this TV show unethical haven't signed a donor registration form themselves.
Because in the end, if they die, then the participants missing out on Lisa's kidney will not die because they lose out on this television kidney lottery. They will die because we, the TV-viewers in Holland, do not fill out a registration form to offer them our kidneys in the unfortunate event we'll die in a car crash tomorrow.
I'd support a reverse system like they have in Belgium, where everyone is liable to having their organs taken out for donation unless they have made it clear that they don't want to in advance.
I wonder how Lisa herself will feel about choosing one candidate out of these three people, although luckily for her at least she won't have many more years to spend feeling guilty about her decision.
If the Christian Democrats don't like it then they shouldn't watch; simple as that. I don't think I'll be watching either, but my guess is that it's not going to be similar to Big Brother, "The Golden Cage" or any of the other filth John de Mol is broadcasting on his own trash channel. BNN have made serious programs about chronic/lethal diseases before.
Nobody's going to read all that probably but that's what I think of it.