Increasingly, it looks as if China is harvesting organs from unwilling Falun Gong and others for sale on the open market. Canadian human rights activists David Kilgour and David Matas have issued a second report, this time including interviews with organ recipients. I haven’t read the new one yet, but the first one chilled me to my bones–about which I wrote last summer.
If this is happening, however, we need not cast all blame on the immoral Chinese. We need to also look in a mirror. Organs wouldn’t be harvested for sale unless there were willing buyers. Thus, just like slavery was profitable because of non slave holders’ support, the same is true of what appears to be a growing black market in organs. People should be ashamed to go to China to buy organs. But increasingly, they are not. Last April, my wife, Debra J. Saunders, wrote about this phenomenon in one of her very best columns in the San Francisco Chronicle called, suitably enough, “American Vampire.”
I will follow up as time allows. In the meantime, throughout the world human life is being reduced to a mere commodity on many different levels. Such is the natural course when we reject the idea of human exceptionalism and the intrinsic worth of all human life.