Wesley Smith writes for National Review Online about a little-reported overseas scandal involving people with no respect for the sanctity of human life.
The black market in human organs does not receive nearly enough attention. China is probably the worst offender here, with political prisoners like Falun Gong practitioners and Uyghur Muslims arrested, tissue-typed, killed, and harvested to supply well-off buyers who don’t want to wait in the donation queue. We are far too nonchalant about that murderous commerce.
Now, a gruesome story out of Nigeria vividly illustrates the sheer evil of this trade in human tissues. From the Daily Mail story:
Over 100 decomposed and mutilated bodies have been discovered in a suspected illegal organ-harvesting slaughterhouse in Nigeria.
Police have sealed off a hotel and private mortuary in the Umuhu autonomous community in Ngor-Okpala district in southeast Nigeria’s Imo state following a raid. …
… Some might ask, if you were dying, wouldn’t you do anything you could to save yourself? I hope to God I would not. By purchasing an organ on the black market, whether from China, Nigeria, or elsewhere, your become complicit in a chain of events usually culminating in murder or the exploitation of destitute people so desperate they are willing to sell a kidney. (This is not the same as altruistic living kidney donatons.) Talk about a stain on one’s soul.
What to do about these horrors? We can’t refuse to treat such exploiters with immune-suppressing medications because that would be akin to a death penalty. But we should shun them. And, in addition to imprisoning the operators of these criminal conspiracies, we should pass laws explicitly making it a crime to purchase organs from overseas — just as we do the purchasing of organs that affects interstate commerce, or traveling to other countries to sexually exploit children.
