October 24, 2013

Short Takes: “Tales From the Organ Trade”

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Tales From the Organ Trade

HBO DOCUMENTARY FILMS

With “king of venereal horror” David Cronenberg narrating, you’d expect stories of people being drugged and dragged onto filthy operating tables, only to awaken with a kidney missing. Actually, director Ric Esther Bienstock makes a decent argument for the sale of kidneys on a regulated market. The World Health Organization, among others, condemns the very notion as the ultimate in First World exploitation, yet some of the so-called victims tell Bienstock how selling a kidney saved them from a life of poverty. As for the well-heeled ill, the choice may boil down to death versus a less-than-ethical transaction. Which would you choose?

This review originally appeared in our November/December issue of Mother Jones.

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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