The News-Press, FL: On organ transplants

August 24, 2006

The following is an excerpt from an editorial that ran in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Thousands of Americans travel overseas every year to get low-cost medical care or treatment.

A relative handful find their way to China, where for the right price -as much as $130,000 for a liver and $160,000 for a heart -organs are available for transplantation.

It's no secret that many of those organs have come from executed prisoners. But there is growing evidence that many are now being obtained from people whose only crime was to practice a form of meditation and exercise called Falun Gong. Many Americans have difficulty accepting the claims from alleged victims.

Removing organs from a live human being for transplanting into a wealthy foreigner seems like a horror movie plot. But an international investigation led by a former member of Canada's parliament concluded last month that "there has been and continues to be the large-scale seizure of organs from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners."

http://www.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060824/OPINION/608