'So Horrific': Organ Harvesting Petition Creator Wants US To Act

One of the doctors behind a White House petition that seeks to end forced organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners in China said the United States needs to act on the large body of evidence that has emerged in the past five years.

It is well known that China harvests the organs of prisoners who are executed. But in 2006, it was first reported that adherents of Falun Gong—a type of meditation practice that gained popularity in China before the Communist Party launched a persecution against it in 1999—are being killed solely for their organs, constituting a crime against humanity. Tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners are believed to have been killed for their organs, which are later sold.

“The main piece of evidence is simply the disparity between the number of transplanted organs in China and the number of organs that are available,” Dr. Alejandro Centurion, who specializes in neurology, told New Tang Dynasty Television. 

Centurion said this factor and other evidence “have convinced me and many other medical professionals that these crimes are truly taking place.”

Elaborating further, he said that upon request, transplant tourists in China are promised an organ within weeks–or sometimes even days. However, it takes years to get an organ in other countries.

“These crimes are so horrific that when people first hear about them, it is hard to believe,” Centurion said.

Since 2006, investigators believe that most of the tens of thousands of organs used for transplants in China have come from prisoners of conscience, namely Falun Gong practitioners, who form the majority of such detainees.

Centurion said that officials in the United States likely have information about organ harvesting in China. The White House “We the People” petition that Centurion launched Dec. 2 asks President Barack Obama to make these records public.

“As a world leader in protecting human rights,” the petition reads, “the United States has a moral obligation to expose these crimes, stop them, and ensure the perpetrators are brought to justice.”

Another initiator of the petition, Dr. Arthur Caplan, who heads the Division of Bioethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, told The Epoch Times earlier this month that he hopes the petition will put an end to the practice of organ harvesting in China. 

“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,” Caplan said.

“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 [that’s] possible. It’s bad enough as it is, but when you see people killed on demand, … killed for questionable reasons, it’s even worse.”

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*Republished with permission from The Epoch Times

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