BEIJING — After years of denial, China has acknowledged that many of the human organs used in transplants here are taken from executed prisoners and that many of the recipients are foreigners who pay hefty sums to avoid a long wait. Speaking at a conference of surgeons in the southern city of Guangzhou, Deputy Health Minister Huang Jiefu called for a strict code of conduct and better record-keeping to stem China’s thriving illegal organ trade, state media reported.
For those of you old enough to remember “Soylent Green”, this story should conjure up some disturbing possibilities.
“SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!!”
I’m not someone who feels that a a human corpse is sacrosanct. Frankly, when I’m done with mine, I don’t much care what happens to it. As a Buddhist, I recognize the human body as merely a shell. My personhood is in the intangibles contained within my body- my thoughts, my dreams, my aspirations. Once I die, my body ceases to be of use to me. Nonetheless, a human carcass should not be viewed as a profit center for a corrupt and inhumane government that cares little for its own people and even less for their welfare. Body farming is, simply put, immoral, unethical, and just plain WRONG.
Though I have no real opinion on the disposition of my own body once I’ve finished with it, this should hardly be taken as license to turn my body, or anyone else’s for that matter, into a profit center…unless my family is the one making that decision. No government should be able to benefit financially from the passing of their citizens- especially when they’re the ones forcibly separating citizens from their mortal coil. Such behavior only exposes a craven and wanton disregard not only for human life, but also for the human rights of their citizens.
Plain and simple, what China is doing is reprehensible, something no civlized nation should countenance in ANY shape, manner, or form. If a government is executing prisoners to meet the demands of the organ-replacement market, that government is clearly demonstrating that it lacks anything even remotely resembling humanity.
Acknowledgment of what had been an open secret on the Internet, in local magazines and among people waiting for transplanted organs came weeks after China announced tighter oversight of death-penalty cases. Legal experts say requiring the country’s highest court to approve death sentences could reduce them by a third.
While China doesn’t disclose the number of people executed each year, Amnesty International reports that at least 1,770 people were put to death in 2005, based on Chinese media reports. Some activists say it could be as many as 10,000.
Even the lower estimate represents more than 80 percent of the 2,148 executions reported to have taken place worldwide last year. The United States executed 60 prisoners.
[Ed. note: Yay, Texas!!! We’re #1!!!]
In July, China ruled that all sales of organs were illegal. But enforcing such decrees can be a problem here, especially when there are such profits.
And especially when corrupt government officials stand to make so much money from either kickbacks for looking the other way or for their direct involvment in body farming.
In September 2004, local media reported that well-known comedian Fu Biao spent more than $36,000 on a liver taken from an executed prisoner in Shandong Province. And starting in June 2005, reports surfaced on the Internet of retinas and kidneys taken from executed former gang members in Henan province near Beijing.
Before we go off on a moralistic tangent here, we should keep in mind that Americans are participating in and facilitating Chinese body farming. For what is the Chinese government doing but meeting the demands of the marketplace?
Americans are among the foreigners who have headed to China for transplants as the waiting time for kidneys and livers has grown in the United States. U.S. transplant doctors say the majority seem to be patients of Chinese ancestry who feel comfortable navigating the medical system there.
One was Mabel Wu, 69, of Northridge, Calif., who received a kidney in July at the Hemodialysis and Organ Transplantation Center of the Taiping People’s Hospital in Dongguan, a city in Guangdong province.
Dr. Gabriel Danovitch, Wu’s kidney specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles, refused to endorse her decision.
“I have concerns and suspicions about who those donors are and what consent might have been involved,” he said, also voicing concern about the quality of medical care.
The family paid about $40,000 for the surgery. They were told only that the donor was a 30-year-old male.
Wu said there were four other patients at the hospital, all from Taiwan, recovering from kidney transplants when she was there. She flew back to California 12 days after the surgery.
“I am very happy with this transplant,” Wu said Friday. “I got a good kidney.”
On the one hand, we should be happy for Wu. She got what she wanted- a second chance at a long and healthy life, and who among us doesn’t want that? Nonetheless, her participation in the murder of Chinese citizens for her own benefits and life extension can only reasonably be called reprehensible. Simply put, Wu has blood on her hands.
What I find so tremendously disturbing is Wu’s willingness to blithely look the other way. Yes, I suppose one could take the attitude that “Well, the prisoner’s dead; it’s not like he’s using the organ anymore, right?”. This is little more than an easy and convenient way to brush aside the moral considerations inherent in this sort of transplant. What if that kidney came from an executed prisoner? And what if that person was executed expressly for the $40,000 fee you paid for his or her kidney? Does that not make you a murderer by association? I believe it does. And if you’re willing to looks the other way while someone else is murdered so you can live simply because you have the requisite amount of cash, you are every bit as reprehensible and devoid of humanity as the Chinese government who made your kidney transplant possible.
I hope you like what you see when you look in the mirror….
Some experts estimate that somewhere in the neighborhood of 90% of all organ transplants in China come from executed prisoners. That figure should give pause to any decent human being with even a shred of anything resembling a moral foundation. If you’re going to China for an organ transplant, there’s a very high likelihood that your organ is coming from an executed prisoner- perhaps even someone who was executed expressly for the purpose of harvesting the organ you’ve paid for. If that doesn’t give you pause, then there really isn’t much hope for you, is there?
To make matters worse, only about 1% of the Chinese citizens who need organ transplants receive, often because they don’t have the cash to pay for the organs they need. How reprehensible is that? When life and death is reduced to an economic transaction, a pay-to-play proposition, then we really have hit rock bottom, haven’t we?
