Iyow - in your own words

In an inspiring-yet-harrowing turn of globalization, there is a thriving international transplant organ market in China. Problem is, it’s been confirmed that a good part of those organs are likely harvested from executed prisoners.

Eric de Leon’s blog journal is a first-person account of his experience getting a liver transplant in Shanghai, first linked online in an SFGate article.

This looks like another situation where Western human rights activists will provoke the Chinese government to stick its we-run-our-country-our-way chin out. Organizations like Amnesty International are pushing for the Chinese government to forbid the practice if prisoners haven’t given their ‘free and informed consent.’ This seems like overreaching to me because those prisoners are not likely exercising any free and informed consent in any aspect concerning their incarceration. The part that’s truly disturbing is that the Chinese penal institution now has a financial incentive to execute. Perhaps this is what the protests are trying to get at, though the talk of ‘free and informed consent’ of someone who is virtually owned by the state and scheduled to be executed becomes rather metaphysical.

In the abovementioned SFGate article, one reluctant American transplantee comes to the conclusion that, “when you’re faced with a certainty—and [the donors] have a certainty—it’s easier to take. Either someone was sentenced to die or it was their time.” Similarly pragmatic, one of the medical consultants at De Leon’s Shanghai treatment center says, “We offer them a chance of living. That’s why [people] come here, because of something we have here and nowhere else is offering.”

In the U.S., prisoners can’t donate organs because their incarceration is already assumed to prevent the giving of their free and informed consent. This seems like overkill – pardon the expression – since willingness to be incarcerated and willingness to donate an organ are two completely separate issues. Our law then seems to assume that incarceration deprives a person of meaningful consent to anything.