China has admitted for the first time that it sells organs harvested from executed prisoners. Now, it intends to regulate the market. (A liver goes for about $40,000.) Once again, human life is being commodified.
“We want to push for regulations on organ transplants to standardise the management of the supply of organs from executed prisoners and tidy up the medical market’” Mr Huang [Jiefu] told Caijing magazine.” How special. We won’t stop it, China is saying: We will manage it.
Not irrelevantly, some of the South Korean excuses for Woo-suk Hwang’s unethical egg procurement for human cloning complained that “Western” ideas of ethics were being imposed on an Eastern country. No, human rights ideas are being promoted to apply universally. It is morally wrong to use humans as a harvestable crop, East or West, North or South.