WASHINGTON—The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting is “wholesale slaughter,” a lawmaker said at a congressional hearing highlighting the issue.
The gruesome practice happens routinely in China as part of a billion-dollar industry, according to experts.
An independent tribunal held in London and headed by Sir Geoffrey Nice concluded in 2019 that forced organ harvesting had happened for years in China “on a significant scale.” According to the tribunal’s findings, adherents of Falun Gong—a spiritual practice that has faced harsh persecution in communist China since 1999—were the main source of organs.
Mr. Nunn had behind him a display board showing the body of a Chinese Falun Gong practitioner who was beaten to death in custody. The graphic image showed stitches extending from around his bruised shoulder area to the abdomen.
“This is not a sci-fi movie. This is not written from a horror book. This is happening right now today in the most populous country in the world,” he said. “And those who have repeatedly been persecuted—the Uyghurs, Falun Gong, and detainees—are oftentimes the subject of these heinous crimes.
“The time for the madness—the wholesale slaughter of a population—has to stop, particularly when it’s used under the guise of doing science.”
“The threat is real; this is not some backwater conspiracy theory,” Mr. Nunn later told NTD, a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times.
‘Choke Off the Demand’
Texas and Utah have recently enacted laws barring health insurance companies from funding organ transplants performed in China, as well as any related aftercare.He told NTD that he was horrified when he “saw images from hospital websites in China that were advertising in English and Mandarin” promoting heart transplants while live donors were “standing by.”
“You can’t be standing by to donate your heart unless you’re standing by to surrender your life,” Mr. Oliverson said.
“When I found out these were prisoners of conscience, these were people who were being persecuted for their religious beliefs, that made it even worse.”
The idea of the health insurance blockade is to “choke off the demand,” he pointed out.
“It’s clear that in a communist regime, people aren’t people; people are just a natural resource to be exploited by the government,” Mr. Oliverson said.
“So that’s where we hit upon the idea of, okay, if there [is] a natural resource to be exploited, let’s make sure that the demand for that resource is as small as we can possibly make it by choking off the ability of Texans to be able to go over there and get an organ transplant.”
The congressman said he’s contemplating another piece of legislation in the near future to block the funding of research connected to organ transplantation in China.
Appeal for Senate Action
Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), chair of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, led an anti-forced organ harvesting House bill that passed near-unanimously in March 2023 in a bid to create criminal penalties for people facilitating the abuse.“How many more victims [might we have deterred from] victimhood, but we didn’t?” Mr. Smith told The Epoch Times. “This has to become a really serious human rights action plan on the part of the administration, and the law will give them that.”
In January 2023, Mr. Smith was in the ICU for physical ailments.
As he lay there, he couldn’t help picturing the Falun Gong practitioners and other prisoners of conscience who were “brought in against their will” to hospitals for their organs.
“They’re laying there, maybe semi-conscious, knowing that this doctor is not there to cure them but to kill them as an executioner,” Mr. Smith said. “That is right out of Nazi Germany.”
After much vetting and waiting, he said, the bill is “ready for passage.”
“I started like four years ago on this particular initiative, and it took that long to convince my colleagues, but now people seem to get it,” Mr. Smith said. “While we all get it, let’s do something about it.”
