A petition on the White House’s We the People website, begun on Dec. 2, asks the U.S. government to investigate and publicly condemn organ transplant abuses in China, particularly those carried out against Falun Gong prisoners of conscience. Tens of thousands of Falun Gong practitioners are believed to have been killed so their organs could be harvested and sold.
One of the principal initiators of the petition is Dr. Arthur Caplan, a well-known bioethicist who is the Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor and head of the Division of Bioethics at New York University’s Langone Medical Center.
Prior to joining New York University, Dr. Caplan was director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was based for nearly two decades. He has written two dozen books and hundreds of journal articles on matters of medical ethics and health policy. He has lectured widely in the United States and abroad and frequently comments to the media on bioethics.
Dr. Caplan has been a public critic of the Chinese Communist Party’s documented practice of sourcing organs from executed prisoners and, in particular, from living prisoners of conscience who are killed in the process of having their organs harvested. This practice, in particular as it relates to Falun Gong prisoners, by far the largest such targeted population, is a focus of the current petition.
