A new report from an online religious liberty magazine is offering a warning about the transplant industry in China’s hospitals, citing the case of a husband taken to a hospital for “treatment,” a visit that ended with his organs being transplanted.
Bitter Winter, a magazine on religious liberty and human rights in China, raised the question of whether the incident was a voluntary organ donation or a “shady harvesting scheme.”
While the nation’s “Regulation on Human Organ Transplantation” affirms that there shall be no transplants made without assuring “free will and free of charge,” the case of a woman identified only as Ms. Jiang undermines that claim.
Her husband, the report said, partly paralyzed, was hospitalized, and suffered a stroke while there.
His physicians said they could do nothing more. But they wouldn’t give definitive answers as to whether he would recover if moved home.
Over the course of several days, she was approached by a physician who said there was a “new procedure in the Red Cross Hospital of Tianjin, a metropolis on the Bohai Sea, which supposedly provides free treatment for critical patients like her husband.”
They had just one condition: If the “treatment” failed, her husband’s organs would be donated.
“I thought it would be better to accept the doctor’s advice than to watch my husband dying in pain because I had no money to help him,” Ms. Jiang told Bitter Winter. “Without further consideration, I asked the hospital to discharge my husband. Three days later, an ambulance was sent to our home. The attending doctor assured me that it was from the Red Cross Hospital.”
She rode with her husband and he “kept his eyes open and breathed normally. He looked well,” she reported.
But the ambulance went right past Beijing to a “secluded place.”
She was told to wait in another vehicle for an “examination” of her husband.
When she was allowed back into the ambulance, her husband was on a “respirator.”
They then continued on to a hospital — but not to the Red Cross facility.
Her husband was taken to the intensive care unit of another hospital in Tianjin; she was sent to a hotel.
“The Tianjin First Central Hospital boasts [of] being the largest organ transplantation hospital in Asia. Bitter Winter has previously reported that Mr. Kim Hyeoncheol, a South Korean TV reporter, conducted undercover investigations in this hospital, disclosing that patients had to wait as little as two weeks for a new organ and that a liver transplant would typically cost about $170,000,” the magazine reported.
On the third day her husband was there, she was told to sign a number of documents, which she did.
Then her husband’s condition “worsened.”
“The next morning, my husband was declared dead, and the hospital took his organs. I still don’t know if he was alive or dead when his organs were harvested,” she told Bitter Winter.
She later discovered about $21,000 in her bank account, deposited by one of her husband’s doctors, the report said.
“Ms. Jiang now realizes that the promise to give her husband the treatment he needed was a hoax to harvest his organs,” the report said.
