The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has called on the United States to sever ties with China’s transplantation system over ongoing concerns about organ sourcing.
“In China, forced organ harvesting of prisoners has continued for over 20 years. To affirm the sanctity of human life, America must sever its ties with China’s organ transplant system,” the department wrote in a post on X, pointing to an article published in The Baltimore Sun titled “America’s complicity in China’s organ harvesting.”
The HHS in July uncovered issues with a federally funded organization and identified more than 100 cases in the United States in which organ procurement occurred when patients showed signs of life or had no cardiac time marked down.
The “domestic scandal” is nonetheless “no isolated incident,” reads the commentary article, which points to the decades-long program of forced organ harvesting in China targeting prisoners of conscience.
In 2019, the independent China Tribunal concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that forced organ harvesting had taken place in China on a large scale, and practitioners of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong were the primary source. In its final report, issued in 2020, the tribunal said it believed the Chinese regime continued to harvest organs from unwilling prisoners of conscience, as there was no evidence that the abuses had stopped.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual discipline based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Its practitioners have been persecuted by the Chinese communist regime since 1999.
Hellbound and Down 