Utah has signed into law a bill to combat the Chinese regime’s horrific practice of forced organ harvesting, making it the second U.S. state to take legislative action against the abuse.
As of May 1, it will be illegal in the state for health insurance providers to cover organ transplant or post-transplant care from China or any other country that is known to have engaged in forced organ harvesting. The bill (S.B. 262) was passed unanimously in both the state’s Senate and House, and was signed by Utah Gov. Spencer Cox on March 14.
Texas is the first U.S. state to take up the issue, as its law went into effect on Sept. 1 last year.
For years, China has been one of the major destinations for transplant tourists, as Chinese hospitals often offer extremely short waiting times for matching organs. Supplying China’s transplant industry is a living organ bank, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been killing prisoners of conscience—including Falun Gong adherents—on a “significant scale” for years, according to findings published by an independent people’s tribunal in London in 2019.
China’s practice of organ harvesting was the topic of a panel held at the Harvard Medical School on March 7. During the event, a Uyghur woman cried and asked if there are ways to stop the abuse more quickly.
“This is an emergency,” she said. “We always say … we have to take lessons from the history. But it’s happening again and again, and even worse.”
Canadian human rights lawyer David Matas, author of the book “Bloody Harvest,” responded that the West needs to “increase the political cost.”
Right now, the CCP’s calculation is that “they benefited more from the mass killing of Falun Gong and Uyghurs because it doesn’t make much of a fuss and they make a lot of money,” according to Mr. Matas.
“You increase the political cost outside of China by increasing awareness, increasing protests, increasing legislation,” Mr. Matas said. “Let’s do it more quickly. Let’s do it soon. Let’s give it a priority. Let’s make this an important thing to do.”
In January, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) called out the CCP’s practice of forced organ harvesting during a speech at the International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington.
“Tibetan Buddhists and Falun Gong practitioners are placed in forced labor camps, and they have their organs harvested by the Chinese Communist Party,” Mr. Johnson said.
Falun Gong
Maya Mitalipova, director of the Human Stem Cell Facility at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, watched the documentary “State Organs” at a screening event hosted by the Falun Dafa Club at the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences on March 7.
“In not a single corner of the world should this happen,” Ms. Mitalipova told The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet NTD. “It’s a genocide. It’s a genocide against Chinese people.”
The 75-minute documentary, produced in Canada last year, centers around the disappearance of two Falun Gong practitioners in China, shortly after the CCP launched its eradication campaign against the practice in July 1999.
Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a spiritual practice with meditative exercises and moral teachings based on truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. Just before the start of the CCP’s nationwide persecution, there were 70 million to 100 million adherents, according to official estimates.
Since then, millions have been detained inside prisons, labor camps, and other facilities, with hundreds of thousands tortured while incarcerated, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center.
In 2023, there were 209 new reported cases of Falun Gong practitioners being persecuted to death, according to a report from Minghui.org, a U.S. website that tracks the persecution in China.
Han Yu, a Falun Gong practitioner who lives in New York, said her father died in a Chinese prison. When she saw her father’s dead body, she said she saw scars and “bruises all over his face.”
There were stitches from his throat to the abdomen, which was full of “hard ice.”
After reading reports in 2007 about forced organ harvesting, she suspected the authorities had harvested organs from her father.
“I cried for a whole night until I had no more strength left,” she told The Epoch Times on March 7.
The Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) is scheduled to hold a hearing on China’s organ harvesting on March 20.
“This hearing will evaluate the evidence of organ harvesting from formerly detained Uyghurs, Falun Gong practitioners, and political prisoners; assess the PRC’s denials that it is complicit in transplant abuse and its assertion that the PRC has stopped sourcing organs from executed prisoners, and look more broadly at how the scientific and medical research communities are addressing the amassed information about organ harvesting,” CECC said in a statement announcing the hearing. PRC is the acronym for the People’s Republic of China.
Among the witnesses scheduled to attend the hearing are Ms. Mitalipova and Texas state Rep. Tom Oliverson, who was a primary sponsor of the Texas legislation that became law banning health insurers in the state from funding organ transplants from organs originating from China.
From The Epoch Times