ROME, May 23, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — The Chinese government is harvesting organs from prisoners while they are still alive to supply its lucrative organ transplant industry, a leading expert on China has told LifeSiteNews.

He is therefore calling on the Vatican to speak out.

Steven Mosher, founder and president of the Population Research Institute, sat down for an interview in Rome this week with LifeSiteNews editor-in-chief John-Henry Westen (see full video below).

Westen spoke with Mosher at the May 20-21 John Paul II Academy for Human Life and the Family conference on “Brain Death: A Medicolegal Construct: Scientific & Philosophical Evidence.”

Mosher said that China — the world’s leader in organ transplants — has moved to a “more advanced” version of its decades-long practice of executing prisoners for their organs, and is now “paralyzing their victim” in order to extract their organs while they are still alive.

China’s policy of executing prisoners for their organs “began in earnest in the 1990s, when the Buddhist sect known as Falun Gong were being arrested by the hundreds of thousands,” he said. “We began to get horrific first-person testimony of how some prisoners were being taken out and executed specifically for their organs.”

“In the early days, it was done rather crudely,” Mosher explained. “They would force the prisoner to kneel down, shoot them in the back of the head, and then they would have an emergency vehicle right there with an operating table, and they would extract the organs — the heart, the corneas, all of the valuable organs that could be sold for tens of thousands of dollars.”

The organs were then put in cold-packs and taken to operating rooms where they could be transplanted, he said.

Mosher explained that, more recently, China has moved to a “more advanced version” by simply paralyzing their victim. “The victim is still alive and breathing but can’t move because the muscles are paralyzed, and they extract the organs while the individual is still living — the heart, the liver, the kidneys, anything you can imagine that has monetary value is being taken out.”

“There is a tremendous amount of money, of course, in organ transplants” he said, “and China does more organ transplants than the rest of the world put together.”

Why the low wait-time?

Mosher noted that there has always been “something peculiar” about the organ transplant industry in China. In the West, he said, “you can wait six months or a year or forever for a tissue match for a kidney or a heart.” But in China, “you are tissue typed as soon as you arrive” and “generally within the week and sometimes as soon as 24-48 hours you have the heart the kidney the liver that you’ve been waiting for.”

“The only way that can happen is by having a million people on death row in China who’ve already been tissue typed,” said Mosher. “They put the tissue of the prospective buyer of the organ into the computer and when a match comes up that person is executed, and their organs are taken out and immediately transplanted into the buyer.”

Denial and coverup

Mosher said the Chinese government has “gone to great lengths” to deny this is happening.

In 2010, he said, the regime created a program to suggest that “voluntary organ donations are increasing dramatically” and are legally acquired “from people who give their informed consent.”

But Mosher, who first exposed China’s one-child policy, pointed out that there are questions about what “informed consent” actually means in China. He said that under the one-child policy China forced women to abort their children “at seven months of pregnancy,” while claiming they had their “informed consent.”

He said the Chinese government’s new claim that there has been a “straight-line increase” in voluntary organ donation is “clearly fabricated” propaganda. “It is clearly a cover story propagated by the doctors in charge of the organ transplant program … to convince the world that, yes, we have millions of Chinese who have now voluntarily donating their organs.”

Will the Vatican speak out?

Mosher said the Chinese government has also made considerable efforts to convince the Chinese Academy of Sciences that it is serious about ending abuse in the organ transplant program.

“It would [therefore] be very helpful if the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, headed by Archbishop Marcello Sorondo, would actually speak out against the continuing practice of organ harvesting in China from people who are executed for their organs,” he said.

In February 2018, Archbishop Sorondo drew sharp criticism after he praised the Chinese Communist regime for being “the best implementer of Catholic social doctrine.” The Chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences added in the same interview that “China has defended the dignity of the human person.”

Mosher told LifeSite he has sent Archbishop Sorondo a recent study showing that China’s data has been fabricated, along with stories of victims. “Well,” he added, “you can’t really talk about victims in this case, because the victims are all dead, but witnesses who’ve testified to the fact that the killing of prisoners still continues.”

“If you put it all together — the speed at which you can get a transplant, the fabricated data, the reports of consent being extorted from individuals — it’s not a pretty picture,” he said. “We still have massive human rights violations in China. This is a question of literally killing people for their organs to make a profit off them.”

Mosher also noted that, last month, the United States called for an investigation into the problem of executing prisoners for their organs, and he invited the Vatican to do likewise.

“I think a lot of people are speaking on this with the same voice, and it would be helpful if Archbishop Sanchez Sorondo added his voice to the people who are demanding China stop this horrible human rights abuse,” he said.

“This is big business,” he said. “It’s business that Communist Party officials are probably profiting by, and it’s a business that they’re unlikely to want to give up unless there’s tremendous international pressure.”

Yet, he added, for China this is par for the course. “Remember, this is a government that that specializes in violations of human rights.” He explained:

If you name a human right China is probably violating. It executes more people every year than the rest of the world combined. It forcibly aborted hundreds of millions of women under the one-child policy that ran for 35 years. It’s imprisoned between 1 and 3 million Uyghur and Kazakh Muslims in the Far West just over the last few years, forcing them to eat pork and drink alcohol and recite the sayings of Xi Jinping. They’re tearing down Catholic churches left and right, destroying Protestant churches, so this fits the pattern of a regime that is driven by a lust for power and a lust for money.

“I think that the Catholic Church should add its voice to a number of us human rights critics of China’s violations and help to get this stopped,” Mosher said.