Good for Canada — a sentiment I haven’t been able to make very often lately. But a Senate committee has unanimously passed a bill that would outlaw Canadians from entering the black market for organs overseas, an exploitive phenomenon sometimes called “organ tourism.” From the Epoch Times story:
The Senate Bill S-204, sponsored by Sen. Salma Ataullahjan, makes it illegal for Canadians to get organs abroad without the consent of the donor, and makes people involved in forced organ harvesting inadmissible to Canada . . .
“We do know that Canadians continue to travel abroad for commercial organ transplant,” Ataullahjan told the committee on April 19.
Canadian human-rights campaigner, David Kilgour, described the situation in stark terms:
Former MP David Kilgour, who has extensively investigated China’s state-sanctioned organ harvesting of Falun Gong adherents, Uyghurs, and others, told the committee that China is the only country in the world where the government is involved in forcibly taking organs from persecuted groups, rather than criminals operating in the black market.
“They don’t just take one kidney, they take the heart, liver, lungs—everything that they can take. And of course, the donor dies in the process,” Kilgour said.
Kilgour said one way Canada is impacted by this is that brokers go to hospitals in Canada and other countries looking for patients who need an organ, and then arrange to take the patient to China for an organ transplant for a considerable sum of money.
This is an urgent matter of protecting human rights and thwarting biological colonialism.
It isn’t just China. Pakistan was forced to outlaw live organ donations to non-relatives because destitute people were being so taken advantage of by organ merchants. The Philippines outlawed all organ transplants for non-citizens to inhibit the practice.
The U.S.A. should get on this band wagon. But too many of us could care less. Some even brag of their participation, such as the book Larry’s Kidney, in which Daniel Asa Rose described the comic adventures of going to China to get his cousin a new kidney. It was reviewed in major newspapers as a tour de force. I wonder if the probably murdered “donor” had a good laugh before his life was extinguished.
I hope Canada passes the bill into law and that we follow that nation’s lead. The desperate destitute should not be treated as so many organ farms. When common decency no longer serves to keep society moral, sometimes the law has to step in.