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China Plans To End Executed Prisoner Organ Donations Within 5 Years
An anonymous reader writes "China said that it planned to end the practice of taking organs from executed prisoners within five years, according to the state media report on Friday. Instead, China's vice minister of health Dr. Huang Jiefu said that the country will rely on a new national donation system for organ transplants at a conference in the city of Hangzhou on Thursday."
i know this will get me downmodded - but why is this something that makes sense? imho those organs (which are most likely needed) now just go to waste, because those people will get killed either way
Me too. Unless they kill prisoners just to get their organs.
Kill all hipsters.
And that Sir, is where you get the moral problem.
In the US, the execution techniques usually used would leave the organs unsuitable for re-use. They would either be saturated with toxins (lethal injection) or cooked (electric chair).
In China, the usual method of execution is a bullet into the back of the head.
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The problem arises when the fact that an executed person's organs can be harvested plays into the calculus of the judge or jury who decides to sentence a person to death. Put another way, if every executed prisoner is a potential source of organs, then you've created a very perverse incentive to execute more prisoners. I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad idea, but you have to be mindful of unintended consequences.
People don't oppose taking organs from the executed because of "antiquated religious nonsense". They oppose it because it gives the government a perverse incentive to execute more people.
If you're on trial, do you really want the judge or jury thinking, even subconsciously, "gee, we could sure use that guy's organs"?
By the way, in the future you might want to put the tiniest modicum of effort into understanding people's positions before launching into, "hurr hurr religious people are dumb and haven't thought this through."
We're already running a largely for-profit prison system in this country. Forgive me if I don't trust that sort of system with "organ donations". There is already too high of an incentive to jail people for non-violent drug related crimes as it is.