CHINESE ORGANS

CHINESE ORGANS

From Pro-Life E-news comes this story. In China, human rights groups say that citizens have been executed for nonviolent offenses like taking bribes, credit card theft, small-scale tax evasion and stealing truckloads of vegetables. Political dissidents have also been sentenced to death. Chinese embassy officials did not respond to requests for comment but, in the past, the government has denied promoting the for-profit organ trade.

The trafficking of human organs from Chinese executions to American residents is “something we’ve always known was going on but something we’ve never been able to document,” says an American investigator working for the Laogai Research Foundation, a group founded by renowned human rights crusader Harry Wu and named for the gulags of China.

Executions often come in floods, usually around the holidays, according to the investigator. This week (the week he wrote this), with Labor Day celebrations that started May 1st, is viewed by Chinese doctors as a particularly good time to get an organ, but there’s no better time than the Lunar New Year. Most—perhaps 70% of the hospitals performing the procedures—are run by the military, which has the best connections to the penal system and can be present at executions.

Money from patients purchasing organs is dispersed among those who provide access to the prisoner’s body. Hospitals even pay judges to tip them off when they sentence a suitable donor to death. The money goes to officials all of the way up the line. It goes to the courts, the people in charge of the prisons, the doctors, the hospitals, everybody.

Three years ago a certain Dr. Thomas Diflo had this literally thrown at him when a patient walked into his office with a freshly implanted kidney bought from China’s death row, where prisoners are killed—sometimes for minor offenses—and their organs harvested.

Since then, Dr. Diflo, director of the renal transplant program at New York University Medical Center, has seen half a dozen such people, typically young Chinese American women. The surgeon says his patients weren’t distressed about snatching organs from the condemned, but he himself was overwhelmed by the implications.

He said, “Several patients were very upfront and candid about it, that they bought an organ taken from an executed convict for about $10,000. Most of the patients are ecstatic to be off of dialysis, and none of them seemed particularly perturbed regarding the source of the organs.”

And this is the nation that’s been given the Olympic games?

http://www.lifeissues.org/radio/r2001/11/r2709.html

Saint Charbel for Life
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