Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour Thursday suspended the life sentences of two black sisters who’d already served 16 years for an armed robbery that netted $11. Barbour conditioned the suspended life sentences on the promise that one sister would donate one of her healthy kidney to her sister, who is presently on dialysis paid for by the state to the tune of about $200,000 annually.
“Jamie Scott’s medical condition creates a substantial cost to the state of Mississippi,” Barbour said in an official statement. “This is a shining example of how governors should use their commutation powers,” said NAACP President Benjamin Jealous, in support of Barbour’s action. But physicians express concerns with the ethics of Barbour’s conditional pardon. “While Governor Barbour probably meant nothing nefarious by this decision, what he did was unethical and possibly illegal,” Michael Shapiro, chief of organ transplantation at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, told the Reuters news agency. “He is unaware of the procedures of transplantation that include making sure donors are not coerced.”
“If either party could be turned down for medical concerns, the transplant team would feel pressured to continue with the transplant or send them back to prison,” Dr. Shapiro said. “It is a position they should not be put in.”
The risks involved raise the question of why Barbour would condition Scott’s release on her undergoing an extremely dangerous life threatening medical procedure. Some critics even argue racism is at work, with the NAACP acting as an unwitting purveyor of prejudice by endorsing a glaring violation of civil and human rights.
To disarm critics, Barbour’s spokesman Dan Turner said the contingency was Gladys Scott’s idea. “It was something that she offered,” Turner said. “It was not held as a quid pro quo.” But even if it were in fact true that non one in her confidence planted the idea in her head as the only option to gaining her freedom, Barbour and the NAACP have a moral and ethical obligation to turn down such an offer because it looks like coercion thinly veiled as consent. “This is clearly a violation of federal law, which prohibits the exchange of ‘valuable consideration’ in return for an organ,” Dr. Michael Shapiro, chairman of the ethics committee for the United Network for Organ Sharing, retorted in a statement.
As human beings and Americans, there is a fundamental human right to have control over one’s own body and what is done to it, both in life and death. The inescapable implication of Barbour and the NAACP’s position is that inmates, regardless of crime or sentence, forfeit the right to such control.
The presumption is that the government should control our bodies and can do what it likes with them after it declares us to be a criminal. This action of making organ donation compulsory if one wants a fair prison sentence transforms an act of altruism into state oppression that could imitate and rival China’s lucrative forced organ harvesting market.
In a Washington Times report, China was exposed as the world’s most notorious market for forced harvesting of organs belonging to criminals. China has long had a secret policy of taking criminals and political prisoners alike, including the forbidden quasi-Buddhist group Falun Gong, Tibetans, “house church” Christians and Muslim Uighurs and harvesting their organs for worldwide sale, human rights activists said in the report. In fact, as many as 41,500 healthy people who practice Falun Gong became involuntary victims of organ transplants and murdered between 2002 and 2005, according to a report that was presented before the U.S. Congress on September 29th, 2006. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (R-California) chaired the first Congressional hearing on the allegations. Back then he said that it was important for the matter of organ harvesting “to get the attention of the American people.”
In a news conference in April on Capitol Hill, several speakers, including attorney David Matas of B’nai Brith Canada and Ethan Gutmann of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said their investigations have unearthed a grisly trade in which an thousands of incarcerated Falun Gong members had been executed for their corneas, lungs, livers, kidneys and skins.
The advocates likened the practice to the Nazi treatment of Jewish prisoners in World War II concentration camps, which included using them for sadistic medical experiments and taking the gold fillings from the teeth of corpses. The newest wrinkle, they said, is that organs from other religious prisoners — specifically dissidents from China’s Christian, Muslim and Tibetan Buddhist communities — are also being harvested to satisfy an insatiable global demand.
“These groups are useless to the state,” Mr. Gutmann said. “They are toxic, so you can’t release them. But they’re worth a great deal of money in terms of their organs.” Organs from just one person can fetch a total of $100,000 on the worldwide market, he added.
With economics butressing the political calculus Barbour and the NAACP are engaging in when they support forced organ donation in exchange for release from prison, there can be no question that the human rights and safety of all prisoners are on the line. It also forecasts that eventually free Americans might one day look forward to a future in which coerced organ harvesting could become the norm.
In Britain, former Prime Minster Gordon Brown came under fire for supporting an automatic organ donor requirement for all UK residents, regardless of criminal status. Brown argued that such a measure would save lives as thousands of people die annually because they don’t have access to organs. It would also save the state money by shaving the cost of sustained treatment if healthy organs are donated. This line of argument is precisely what Barbour parrots. But with healthcare available to only the wealthy and affluent that can afford the premiums, and with state sponsored programs being eliminated due to austerity measures, apparently the donated organs would only go to the wealthy and affluent anyway, creating a system where the poor must give their organs so that the wealthy may live.