Academics and human rights experts will spotlight forced organ harvesting perpetrated by the Chinese communist regime at an upcoming webinar.
“Harvesting organs for transplantation from living people—it’s not only a violation of nursing, and medical ethics and basic human rights, but it’s a crime against humanity,” said Deborah Collins-Perrica, director of nursing affairs at Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting (DAFOH), a Washington-based advocacy group that is co-organizing the event.
The
virtual event, to be held on Nov. 1 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. ET, will discuss the overwhelming evidence of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) killing of prisoners of conscience for their organs.
State-sanctioned forced organ harvesting has taken place in China for years “
on a significant scale,” a London-based independent tribunal found in 2019. After a year-long investigation, the panel of lawyers and experts, known as the China Tribunal, concluded that such actions amounted to crimes against humanity, with imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners being the primary source of organs.
Falun Gong, a spiritual practice consisting of meditative exercises and moral teachings based on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, became hugely popular in China in the 1990s, with an estimated 70 million to 100 million adherents by the end of the decade. The ruling communist regime, feeling a threat to its power, launched a
nationwide persecution against the practice in 1999. Since then, millions of Falun Gong adherents have been thrown into prisons, labor camps, and brainwashing centers across the country, where they are subjected to torture, forced labor, or even forced organ harvesting.
To prevent the international medical profession from being unknowing accomplices to this grisly practice, doctors and advocates have
urged transplantation communities to stop collaborating with China and to ban Chinese research papers about organ transplantation.
Earlier this year, a
first-of-its-kind restriction was issued by the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation, a nonprofit transplantation association. The group announced in late August that it would stop accepting transplantation research papers from China, in an effort to end the abuses currently taking place under the communist regime.
Collins-Perrica said that through the virtual event, she hopes to “inspire ... nurses to take action.”
The webinar, organized by DAFOH and the Academy of Forensic Nursing, is the first event within the nursing field to address the organ harvesting issue, according to Collins-Perrica.
In the United States, there are more than 4 million registered nurses, according to the American Nurses Association.
“It’s a big group of people to educate,” she told The Epoch Times.
Stopping Transplant Tourism to China
Collins-Perrica, a former psychiatric clinical nurse for the U.S. Department of Defense and Veterans Health Administration, said part of the goal of the upcoming conference is to inform nurses on how to respond if their patients go to China for an organ.The health care professional said she first learned about organ harvesting while doing a research project during her graduate studies. In the project, she interviewed about 50 people from New England who had received heart transplants, and one of them had traveled to China for the organ.
This then led Collins-Perrica to dig more into the issue.
Patients from all over the world travel to China, at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars or more,
for transplants, often due to the country’s shorter wait times for organs.
Such transplant surgeries can even be
scheduled ahead of time. In 2005, a patient at Sheba Medical Center at Tel Aviv University in Israel told his physician, Dr. Jacob Lavee, that he was going to China for a heart transplant operation that was due in two weeks. As a heart transplant surgeon, Lavee knew it was impossible to predetermine the availability of an organ for transplant, especially a heart, in any system that relies on voluntary donation.
Realizing that this could only be the result of forced organ harvesting, Lavee spearheaded the crafting of
Israel’s Organ Transplant Law, which came into effect in 2008 and essentially bans the purchase and sale of human organs. The legislation significantly reduced transplant tourism from the country, according to a 2012 study published in the American Journal of Transplantation.
Collins-Perrica hopes the upcoming nurses summit will lead to more action to combat and prevent forced organ harvesting.
“Something so evil is global; something so evil touches all of humanity, because it’s a deterioration of ethics,” she said.
“One person at a time will stop this.”
Joan Delaney contributed to this report.
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