Americans ‘Can Make a Difference’ With Organ Harvest Petition, Says Doctor
A petition on the White House’s We the People website was begun on Dec. 2 that asks the United States government to investigate and publicly condemn organ transplant abuses in China, particularly those carried out against Falun Gong prisoners of conscience, tens of thousands of whom are believed to have been killed so their organs could be harvested and sold.
One of the principal initiators of the petition is Dr. Arthur Caplan, a well-known bioethicist who is currently Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor and head of the Division of Bioethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. Prior to joining New York University Dr. Caplan was director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, an institution at which he was based for nearly two decades. Dr. Caplan has written two dozen books and hundreds of journal articles on matters of medical ethics and health policy, and has lectured widely in the United States as abroad, and frequently comments to the media on bioethics.
Dr. Caplan has been a public critic of the Chinese Communist Party’s documented practice of sourcing organs from executed prisoners, and in particular from living prisoners of conscience, who are killed in the process of having their organs harvested. This practice, in particular as it relates to Falun Gong prisoners, by far the largest such targeted population, is a focus of the current petition.
In an interview conducted on Dec. 5, Dr. Caplan discusses the significance of the petition and the effect he hopes it will have on stopping the killing of prisoners for their organs in China.
More information about the petition may be found at organpetition.org. Interview has been condensed and edited.
Why is it important that the United States publicly raise this issue with China?
This kind of pressure will lead to change. Even if the Chinese government says it’s willing to make changes, as they’ve said, you have to keep the pressure on to make sure it happens. Obviously killing people is clearly wrong and a violation of human rights and basic decency, and we can bring pressure by making it part of American policy with the Chinese. There are people in China that want to change the policy, that think that the time has come to make the change, but we have to keep the pressure on right now. This petition to keep the issue center stage is very important.
What do you think of the promises to end the abusive system of organ sourcing made so far by Chinese officials?
I think the promises are hopeful, but they’re not enough. You have to really see action and proof that programs are being set up to have organs acquired legitimately. Websites offering transplant tourism on demand, livers and other organs, need to be taken down, so the promises are made good on. I think there are people of goodwill in China who want to make the change, but it’s important now to keep the pressure on, to make sure promises turn real. I’d like to see evidence of a donor system in place from cadaver sources, and education for Chinese people to make them comfortable with this new practice. It will take time to shift public thinking in China on this. You’ve got to keep the pressure on, because it’s wrong, killing for parts.
Why are the abuses targeted in your petition particularly worthy of censure?
Well, it’s a serious, serious violation. It’s certainly about as bad as things can get. We do not accept killing for getting organs. It’s a basic principle of medical ethics that you don’t do that. And we know that the people they’re killing are guilty of nothing more than views that the government does not like. So it makes it worse, if possible. It’s bad enough as it is, but when you see people killed on demand, who are killed for questionable reasons, it’s even worse.
The idea of forced organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience can be too horrible for some people to believe. What do you say to colleagues who respond in this manner?
You have to point it out to them and explain that the numbers are self evident. If they’re doing thousands of transplants, and we know—and they admit—that there is no cadaver organ donation, the only place to get the organs is from living people. And you’re not going to have living people donate a liver. It has to be coming from people who are being killed. They’ve admitted as much.
The U.S. Congress has recently had a hearing on this topic; the Taiwanese parliament has proposed a resolution related to it; and there will be hearings in the European Parliament soon. Do you think the U.S. government should be the one to take a lead on addressing this with China?
Yes, I believe we should take the lead. We are the world’s leader in medicine and the world’s leader in transplantation, so that alone gives us an opportunity to use our expertise and our skill in the area to bring the issue forward and make sure we see compliance with the promises. So yes, we should certainly join other nations but also we have special standing here because of American biomedical preeminence.
What about the concern that publicly raising these issues will problematize the U.S.-China relationship in other areas?
I think there is some risk of that, but the outrage of the practice doesn’t permit a tradeoff here. I think you can’t stay quiet about killing for organs. It’s too heinous. Its’ just too wrong. It violates all ideas of human rights. It violates American policy about how to get organs. It’s just too important to not call attention to for fear of souring relations. Moreover, I think there are people in China who do want to change the policy, and need support, and speaking up gives them that support.
Are you confident that a legitimate system of organ procurement can be established in China, given what has gone on?
I think it can be established, but I think it may take some time. I don’t think the practice should continue, because it’s just wrong. It may mean some loss of lives because there won’t be transplants, but I think you can get there. Other countries, where the country has been dubious about cadaver organ donation, have made the transition.
Do you have any words for Americans considering signing the petition?
I urge them to sign it. I urge them to send it to their friends and organizations they’re involved in, to circulate it widely. It’s an important petition because they can make a difference. They would be sending a message that Americans find the practice of killing for parts repugnant, they don’t want it to go on, they think China can do better, and they think the promises of change should be fulfilled.
Bloody Harvest: Stealing Organs For Profit
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/24992/
OTTAWA—Bloody Harvest: The Killing of Falun Gong for their organs is a meticulous account of true events that reads like a horror story.
A portent of that horror comes early in the book: “The allegations, if true, represented a disgusting form of evil which, despite all the depravities humanity has seen, was new to this planet.”
In May 2006, coauthors David Matas and David Kilgour received a letter from the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong (CIPFG) asking them to investigate allegations that imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners were being used to supply vital organs for the transplant tourist industry in China.
With no eyewitness testimony available and unable to enter China, the authors used independently verified sources of evidence and a deductive reasoning model to conclude that the allegations were indeed true.
The result of their investigations was a preliminary report released in July 2006. A second report, with new substantiations, was released in January 2007. Both were published on the Internet.
The newly released book is larger than the reports and contains previously unpublished materials. It is presented in two sections: the evidence that led to the authors’ conclusions, and the responses to the reports, followed by some suggestions on how to stop the practice of using living organ donors in China.
Kilgour and Matas concluded that “A set of peaceful, healthful exercises with a spiritual foundation was made illegal in 1999 by the Communist Party because of fear it might threaten the Party’s dominance, and it appears that many human beings engaged in these exercises have been in effect executed for their organs by medical practitioners.”
Matas, a human rights lawyer who received the Order of Canada for his human rights work, and Kilgour, a former crown prosecutor and former Member of Parliament, have produced a damning body of evidence that could shake the world press and various governments from their complacency regarding the Chinese regime’s persecution of Falun Gong.
CIPFG chair Clive Ansley said he’s delighted with the release of Bloody Harvest and hopes the book “sparks a lot more public debate than we’ve had up ‘til now.”
He said the mainstream press has been “inexcusably derelict” by not reporting on the illicit harvesting of Falun Gong organs in China.
“The knowledge is there, people in the media know it, but they’ve done almost nothing about publicizing it, which means that a very significant percentage of the population in North America particularly remains unaware of the fact that we’re watching another holocaust essentially.”
Starting with the knowledge that 1999—the year in which the number of organ transplants performed in China began rising dramatically—was the same year that the persecution of Falun Gong started, the authors uncovered various supporting facts that explain why the abhorrent organ harvesting started and how it is carried out. Some of the many factors described in the book include:
* No system for voluntary donation exists in China, and a societal aversion to the practice means organ donors are rare.
* Numerous testimonials of previous Falun Gong prisoners detailing how they were routinely blood tested and examined while regular criminal inmates were not.
* Testimonials of people who traveled to China to receive transplants and the impossibly short wait time for a matched organ to become available.
* Websites advertising living organ donors whose renal function is verified before the operation.
* The huge number of transplants performed annually cannot be accounted for using executed prisoners or brain-dead patients.
The involvement of military physicians and hospitals trafficking in human body parts coupled with the systematic persecution of Falun Gong adherents resulted in large numbers of organ transplants occurring without any record of the source of the donors.
“A full explanation of the source of all organ transplants would disprove the allegation,” wrote the authors.
“If the source of all organ transplants could be traced, whether to willing donors or executed prisoners, then the allegation concerning the Falun Gong would be disproved. But such tracing is impossible.”
The part played by the western world in enabling the harvesting of organs from living human beings is also discussed, including the role of economic considerations as businesses and governments try to please the communist leaders so they can maintain trade relations and make money in China.
The authors make a case for continued human rights advocacy in China and explain that although the Chinese regime can’t be forced to change its principles, it can be confronted with the facts. The facts make the regime look bad, and China fears loss of face above all else.
To learn more go to: http://organharvestinvestigation.net/ or read the book Bloody Harvest: The Killing of Falun Gong Practitioners For Their Organs
This is ridiculous that no mainstream news agencies are covering this. People are being tortured and killed each day and websites like cnn.com or msnbc.com don't even have one article that aims to bring these issues to light. They'd rather run stories like "zebra escapes from local zoo" along with 10 min of home video cam footage of a man chasing a zebra around through his neighborhood. Wtf is wrong with them? The only explanation that I can think of is that all of the News Corp Rupert Murdoch owned media outlets aren't trying to prevent public awareness about this in order to preserve america's "Relation$" with china. In the information age where pretty much everyone has access to wireless internet, it's just incomprehensible that the only word about this getting out is through pamphlets being passed around at colleges from escaped victims or on non-mainstream news sites such as this. At the rate we're going, this could be happening in America right now and we would still have not one clue about what is going on.
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