Over the decades, American doctors, medical schools, hospitals and
pharmaceutical companies developed skills and knowledge enabling
life-giving transplants of organs including hearts, kidneys, livers,
lungs and corneas. These skills and knowledge have spread around the
world.
These skills can be abused or used to set in motion sales
of organs by the poor or favoritism for the rich. Consequently, the
international community has developed demanding protocols to assure that
organ donations follow strict procedural and ethical guidelines,
codified by the Declaration of Istanbul in 2008. One bedrock principle
is that donors must give consent. Another is that condemned prisoners
cannot be donors. Extending these principles, medical journals will not
publish articles on transplant research if organs came from executed
prisoners.
In the mid-1990s, I began holding hearings on the practice of organ harvesting of prisoners in
China,
and unfortunately, the controversial practice has not gone away. At a
hearing for which I was co-chairman last week, two subcommittees of the
House Foreign Affairs Committee heard that even though few Chinese voluntarily donate organs,
China
stands next behind the United States in the yearly number of organ
transplants. With 600 transplant centers, it has become a destination
for “transplant tourism.” Each transplant of a heart or liver can
provide more than $100,000 in revenue.
What adjectives can we use
to describe the prospect that Chinese doctors and hospitals are engaged
in large-scale harvesting of human organs for profit? The ordinary words
such as “disturbing,” “appalling” or even “shocking” are inadequate.
So
far, I have referred to ordinary transplants. But there’s a graver
prospect. It is that Chinese military doctors may be engaged in organ
harvesting from prisoners and labor-camp detainees, especially prisoners
of conscience.
China’s
vice minister of health acknowledged in 2005 that almost all organs come
from executed prisoners, but the number of executions in
China is a “state secret.” In
China,
there are no firm statistics, no open waiting lists and no transparency
in the granting of “consent.” From the few times Chinese doctors or
health officials have discussed
China’s
transplant system at international meetings, the figures don’t add up.
The best available outside estimates indicate that the number of
transplants apparently exceeds the number of criminal executions. So
then, what is the source of the additional organs?
A witness at the hearing,
Ethan Gutmann, interviewed Chinese medical personnel now outside
China.
He learned of the removal of organs by teams of military doctors in
medical vans immediately after executions. The victims, he learned, came
from
China’s
prisons or from re-education through labor camps — far from justice and
investigation. They are, of course, unable to escape and testify, and
expeditious cremation destroys physical evidence.
Some
Falun Gong
practitioners released from labor camps report that the camp doctors
gave them frequent physical examinations, with special attention to
their blood type and the health of their kidneys, livers, lungs, hearts
and eyes — “the retail organs.”
Many members of this spiritual
movement — unjustly held, abused, subjected to psychological and
physical torture for nothing more than fidelity to “truthfulness,
compassion and forbearance” — refused to reveal their names when taken
into custody. They feared reprisal against relatives and other
practitioners. Their anonymity made them vulnerable to having their
lives taken from them to provide organs for transplants.
The most gruesome testimony came from Chinese doctors who told
Mr. Gutmann that some of the organs for transplant came from still-living victims.
Yes,
these reports of horror sanctioned by a modern state beg for evidence,
and proof is in short supply. But this possibility pushes us into a
horrific beyond, a beyond that challenges our language, making
“barbaric” too calm a word, too leached of horror.
We all hope
these fragmentary reports and the circumstantial evidence do not add up
to barbarism. Here, tragically, the track record of other Chinese
policies does not give confidence. In
China,
a mother protesting inadequate sentences meted out to criminals who
abducted and sold her 11-year-old daughter into sexual slavery was
herself sentenced to re-education through labor. In
China,
many women are forced to abort their children as routine policy, even
in the third trimester. Others endure forced sterilization. In
China, the
Communist Party stands above the law. We hope there are other explanations for the evidence, but we cannot rest until we know more.
China’s state- and party-controlled media say
China’s people know they benefit from the glorious leadership of the
Communist Party. The truth is different.
China’s
people have hearts that yearn for freedom and faith, lungs that long to
breathe clean air and eyes that hope to see a better future. When
China
has become a destination for “transplant tourism,” when aging party
cadres receive organs from those in prisons and labor camps, when some
of those organs are taken from religious and political dissidents, when
the
Communist Party speaks of hearts, we know it is not speaking of love, devotion or loyalty. It is thinking of dollar signs.
Rep.
Christopher H. Smith, New Jersey Republican, is chairman of the U.S.
Congressional-Executive China Commission and the House Foreign Affairs
subcommittee on Africa, global health and human rights.
