With advanced medical treatments getting more accessible to public, there has been a scarcity of organs for transplantation for the past few decades. In order to meet the enormous demand, alternative sources have been adopted from condemned prisoners to supplement the supply. In particular, the practice of harvesting the organs of condemned prisoners for use in transplant operations has become an open secret in China. As the number whom she executes has decreased by 75% in recent years, shortage problem arises for a medical system that relying on such flow of organs. In fact, use of executed prisoners' organs for medical transplantation has always received bitter criticism from the international community. What highlight the problem are the …show more content…
From this perspective, several ethical concerns have been raised which makes organ recovery from executed prisoners an undesirable act to be performed. First of all, vital organ procurement becomes a way of execution and it places the physicians in the role of executioner and shift the setting of capital punishment away from prison, neither of which is morally acceptable. Furthermore, in China, a common practice of execution for those who are destined to be organ donors is temporal gun shooting. The executed is then declared dead, which is not the typical classifications of brain-death or circulatory-death, and sent to a hospital for organ procurement optimum for transplantation. Ethical question emerges because it is uncertain that a donor is truly dead —with cessation of heart and lung function becoming irreversible, when vital organs are retrieved from his body. This process has been described as death-inmates receiving their “unfinished execution in the surgery theater… and finished by transplantation surgeons” [1]. Such arrangement is a direct violation of dead donor rule (DDR) [2], which states that organ procurement must not kill the donor and organ donation has to be carried out from the deceased. It has long been a bright line to separate death and donation so as to assure public trust. If this …show more content…
Even for death row inmates, they are entitled to the option of refusing any invasive surgical procedure. The prisoners to be executed or their families should be able to make an informed decision on any organ donation matters. Any widely recognized cultural or religious practices in relation to organ donation should also be respected. In China, for instance, where people’s values are strongly influenced by Confucianism, xiao, or filial piety has an important role to play in organ harvesting. It is believed that a person’s body is granted by his parents and one needs to “return” it upon death with a condition as intact as it was received. Organ donation is thus conceived as a violation of the corpse’s integrity and an offensive act to one’s ancestors even in today’s world. To mitigate the resistance received from the community, and to show respect to donors and their next of kin, death and donation should be handled separately with the latter only be done voluntarily. Yet, it has been reported on The Economist that although condemned prisoners are claimed to have agreed to donate his organs after execution, organs indeed are often harvested without consent neither from the executed prisoners or his surrogate. Such practice is an immoral violation of human rights and should not be tolerated when we placed respect to a person’s will and his corresponding cultural beliefs at our top