Seamus Burns considers the moral sensitivities surrounding the international trade in body parts
The recent revelations that executed Chinese prisoner’s organs are being used for transplantation purposes, and bought by rich recipients, raises fundamental issues about the legality and ethics of creating a market in buying and selling organs.
The number of executions and the correct figures for resulting transplantation procedures cannot be confirmed precisely, but the British Transplantation Society (BTS), in April 2006, claimed that China harvested the organs of thousands of executed prisoners without their consent every year to sell for transplants.
Professor Stephen Wigmore, chairman of the BTS’s ethics committee, argues that the speed with which donors are matched to patients—sometimes in as little as a week—implies that prisoners are being selected for transplantation before execution. Chinese government figures vigorously contest allegations about the scale of these ethically dubious transplantation procedures. On the 28 March 2006 a foreign ministry spokesperson, Qin Gang, stridently countered the accusations:
“It is a complete fabrication, a lie or slander to say that China forcibly takes organs from the people given the death penalty for the purpose of transplanting them.”
Although
