China’s Forced Organ Harvesting Demands U.S. Response

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Real Clear Politics

American doctors go to great lengths to maintain the highest ethical standards as they work to save thousands of desperately ill patients waiting for an organ match, as underscored in recent reporting of innovative transplant experiments using genetically modified pig hearts. China’s transplant sector, unconstrained by rigorous ethical rules, found a more expedient solution. China created a thriving transplant industry, the world’s second largest, based on a supply of organs forcibly harvested from executed prisoners – most likely prisoners of conscience.

Though China announced that it banned this hideous practice in 2015, transparency is lacking and mounting evidence indicates that it continues. Nevertheless, the American transplant sector, while adhering to medical ethics at home, openly supports China’s transplant doctors and industry.

In 2006, shocking reports first surfaced of China forcibly harvesting organs from detained Falun Gong adherents. According to these reports, after Falun Gong, a Chinese spiritual meditation group, was targeted for “elimination” by China’s president in 1999, thousands of practitioners were thrown into labor camps and jails and subjected to organ screening, unexplained deaths, and disappearances. Many, the group says, were killed for their organs, which were sold to China’s transplant sector, just as it surged and became a billion-dollar industry. Credible testimony from former detainees, relatives, patients, and surgeons supports this. It was during this period that scores of Chinese transplant surgeons published articles, openly describing procedures on prisoners who “were alive and breathing as the surgeons cut their hearts out,” as documented in a 2022 article in the respected American Journal of Transplantation, written by Victims of Communism Foundation fellow Matthew Robertson and Israeli Dr. Jacob Lavee.

Last year 12 independent UN experts stated they were “extremely alarmed” by “credible information” that forced organ harvesting was continuing and, moreover, targeting China’s various religious minorities. Several sources report evidence that the atrocity has spread to Xinjiang’s massive network of closed detention camps, which, significantly, were built after 2015, and which both Republican and Democratic administrations recognized as the site of ongoing genocide against China’s Uyghur Muslims.