In all Jacob Lavee’s years as head of the Israeli Transplant Association and pioneer in the field of organ transplant surgeries, he had never heard a proclamation like that of his patient in 2005:
“I am tired of waiting. I am going to China to get the heart I need.”
It should not be possible. Vital organs can only be procured after tragic accidents kill donors. That is why the wait time was so long and unpredictable, even for a patient at the top of the waiting list.
Yet this man had been promised a heart from a hospital in China two weeks in advance.
When the patient returned to Israel with a new heart several weeks later, Lavee knew something was wrong. The transplant had been successful, but the source of the human heart remained a mystery — a mystery laced with crimes against humanity, religious persecution, and a quest for immortality.
Experts now catalog Levee’s story among countless others pointing to a mass organ harvesting industry operating under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Americans tend to think that nothing like that could ever happen in the West. And they might be right — western liberal democracies are unlikely to seize life and liberty from free citizens by harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience.
But modern euthanasia movements might just convince citizens to give up their right to life while potentially delivering hundreds of organs to the market.
“Medical Assistance in Dying” (MAiD) encourages the elderly, infirm, and weary to kill themselves with physician-prescribed or administered drugs. Just like abortion, euthanasia administers death disguised as healthcare. A consistent pro-life message must confront euthanasia as well as abortion.
Eligibility for physician assisted suicide is expanding. The definition of “dead” is shifting. The demand for organ transplants is rising. And through it all, the imago Dei is being trampled underfoot by a culture of death.
Perhaps an exposition of China’s forced organ harvesting industry is the wake-up call the West needs to stop euthanasia, end its complicity in China’s dehumanizing practices, and affirm the dignity of human life from conception through natural death.
The normalization of choosing death in the West
Large movements for the normalization of euthanasia deny the value of human life. Euthanasia is legal in several Western countries, including Canada, the Netherlands, Australia, and Belgium. The legality of physician assisted suicide in the U.S. varies from state to state, with a majority of Americans affirming the practice.
A Pew Research study recently found that only 35% of Americans believe that patients choosing to end their lives with the help of a doctor is morally wrong. Another 63% either believe it is morally acceptable or not a moral issue at all.
The rhetoric of euthanasia’s supporters cleverly appeals to Christian compassion and western values with language of “death with dignity,” “mercy killing,” and “medical assistance” rather than “suicide” and “killing.”
In some countries, conversations about euthanasia are so normalized that medical communities simply record it with a billing code, masquerading killing as medical treatment. Some churches in Canada are experimenting with liturgies and prayers to be read in the moments before, during, and after a planned death. While the church has been careful not to explicitly affirm euthanasia, maintaining that pastoral care for the dying should not depend on the cause of death, the new liturgy illustrates a broader normalization of euthanasia within the church.
While MAiD programs were initially designed for patients diagnosed with terminal illnesses, accessibility is expanding. Some countries are toying with rules that would allow patients with exclusively mental illnesses to choose death. There are stories of doctors encouraging patients with acute injuries to consider euthanasia, including a Catholic priest in Canada whose only injury was a fractured hip.
Most doctors genuinely want to help people. However, as some medical communities accept physician assisted suicide — a practice that stands in contrast to the Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm” — the meaning of care itself is being called into question. Should doctors prolong life or end pain? Should doctors submit to every patient’s wish, or do what is medically best for the patient?
Connecting the dots between euthanasia and organ donation
With the possibility of organ donation following MAiD deaths, suicide takes on a new disguise — no longer a cold escape, but an empathic sacrifice.
Someone is in pain. They are losing control over the bodily functions. They feel like a burden on their family. Living hurts in more ways than one. A doctor tells them that he can help, that he can make the pain stop and hasten their inevitable death. The patient is conflicted.
Then the doctor says that their death could potentially save eight lives, young lives, lives of people who want to live.
Who could resist that siren song?
A study of data from Québec found that organ donation after MAiD had increased substantially since the development of the program in 2017. In 2023, almost 15% of all donors in the province were patients who had chosen death.
MAiD is most frequently offered to patients with cancer, precluding them from organ donation. However, 10% of MAiD patients are capable of donating at least one organ, and that number will continue to grow as eligibility requirements broaden to include non-terminal and mentally ill patients.
Doctors and bioethicists alike are concerned about the conflict of interests posed by the overlap between MAiD and organ donation. They argue that guidelines are imperative to preserve patient autonomy. They also submit that clarification of the Dead Donor Rule — an internationally accepted standard that all vital organ donors must be dead — is long overdue. “Brain death” and “euthanasia by organ donation” are blurring the lines of ethical medical practice.
The demand for human organs
Over 100,000 Americans are currently waiting for an organ transplant. According to some estimates, 17 people die each day waiting for an organ.
In the case of non-vital organs such as kidneys, transplant organs ordinarily come from living family members, friends, or philanthropic donors. Donors and recipients must match blood types, tissue types, and body size for the procedure to succeed.
Because organs deteriorate rapidly as individuals die, vital organs such as hearts and lungs can only be procured from people who died suddenly in geographical proximity to compatible recipients. Transplant surgeons prefer “brain dead” patients — patients who have sustained permanent injuries that will prevent them from regaining consciousness, but whose vital systems may still be functioning.
Considering all the factors that must align for a successful organ transplant, it is no wonder that the wait times for organs stretch years with no assurance that the perfect match will ever be found.
The statistics may seem tragic, but they only affirm what Christians already know: Men are mortal, and God destined all men to “die once, and after that to face judgement” (Hebrews 9:27). For the Christian, death is the inevitable passageway to eternal life with God.
For those who do not know Christ, death is an enemy to be feared and defeated — and some will use any means available to continue living.
China’s forced organ harvesting industry
Jan Jekielek, senior editor of the Epoch Times, published “Killed to Order” earlier this year, detailing the motivations and methods of the CCP’s forced organ harvesting industry, and the complicity of Western countries that make it possible. Jekielek recently sat down with NRB to share what he has learned.
“It’s the loss of the dignity of every individual human being,” Jekielek said. “Imagine what this forced organ harvesting system has done in China — it’s turned every transplant surgeon into a murderer.”
The CCP has a documented history of severe human rights abuses, including targeting, detention, and persecution of marginalized populations deemed a threat to party control. Today, the CCP targets religious minorities, especially Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghur Muslims, and Christians.
Since the CCP outlawed Falun Gong in 1999, it has imprisoned tens of thousands of practitioners, many of whom later reported enduring forced medical testing and torture.
For Jekielek and others who had been tracking the evidence of forced organ harvesting in China, these testimonies confirmed some of their darkest suspicions: The CCP was using prisoners of conscience to create a living organ bank of healthy, unidentified, and disposable prisoners.
Jekielek depicts the system this way: When someone comes to China seeking an organ transplant, CCP military doctors identify a compatible prisoner and set a date for the surgery. Behind the walls of hospitals or prisons, military doctors kill the prisoner by removing their organs. The organs are transplanted into the recipient, who is likely told that the organ came from a criminal on death row — a gross exaggeration of the circumstances.
The CCP and its accomplices get paid and the recipient gets to live. The dead prisoner is discarded.
The Matas & Kilgour Report admits that their collected evidence does not constitute deductive proof that the CCP is harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience. However, the facts and gaps tend toward that conclusion.
Scholars estimate that China conducts a minimum of 60,000 transplants each year — a number far exceeding the 16,000 possible transplants accounted for by China’s voluntary donor base. While these figures certainly include medical transplants performed by honest Chinese surgeons, the disparity between donors and transplants demands an explanation from the CCP.
Several surgeons and their families have described their participation in organ harvesting. In 2006, the wife of a Chinese surgeon testified that her husband had removed the corneas from thousands of living Falun Gong practitioners. Surgeon Enver Tohti says he was forced to harvest a liver and kidneys from a prisoner in the Chinese countryside.
Cheng Pei Ming escaped China in 2015 after undergoing a surgery in a prison hospital that removed part of his liver and lung without his consent. His scars and stories align with allegations of organ harvesting.
The motivation for the madness
The obvious attraction of operating an organ harvesting network is financial. The global organ transplant market is valued at over $18 billion and projected to reach over $40 billion by 2035. An individual human organ is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
But the spiritual implications run even deeper.
In September 2025, a hot mic captured a conversation between Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin indicating that elites may be sacrificing the life of the poor and needy in order to preserve their own.
Conversing through interpreters, the conversation is documented as follows:
Xi: “Earlier, people rarely lived to 70, but these days at 70 you are still a child.”
Putin: “With the development of biotechnology, human organs can be continuously transplanted, and the longer you live, the younger you become, and you can even achieve immortality.”
Xi: “Predictions are, this century, there’s a chance of also living to 150.”
“The forced organ harvesting industry is a centerpiece of the elite longevity project,” Jekielek said. “What would it be worth if you were a Chinese super elite and you have unlimited organs available to you in perpetuity on demand?”
It seems power does not satisfy, and leaders are now on a quest to live forever.
The devil wants men to steal one of Christianity’s most beautiful promises — eternal life with God — and twist it into an earthly immortality formed from the organs of the innocent.
It is the newest iteration of mankind’s continual, satanic quest to wrest the power of life and death out of God’s hands and into his own.
Confirming human dignity in the image of God
Is it ever acceptable for a doctor to kill one patient to save several others, especially when the sacrificed patient is willing?
The Bible denies utilitarian answers with assurances that the lives of men belong to God, that Christ has ultimately defeated death, and that suffering purposes to draw man closer to God.
Christians “rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame” (Romans 5:3-5).
As the aging man who feels like a waste, burden, and embarrassment to his caregivers puts his faith in Christ, he develops a character and hope incompatible with shame. God created every life with purpose, and God designates death with just as much intention and love, appointing to each “a time to be born, and a time to die” (Ecclesiastes 3:2).
The fight against euthanasia is rightly a pro-life movement, siding against the killing of the elderly and infirm for the same reasons Christians reject the abortion of unborn children. Euthanasia is an iteration of the battle between a secular culture of death and a Judeo-Christian culture of life and dignity.
“Facilitating and hastening the death of a sick person implies that some lives are not worth living,” the Family Research Council said in an issue brief. “This mindset will ultimately lead to an overall loss of respect for life.”
Every movement to dehumanize — organ harvesting, euthanasia, and abortion — begins with changes to rhetoric. Babies become fetuses. Suicide becomes medical assistance. People groups become threats.
“[Dehumanization] activates a quirk in our psychology that allows us to just tolerate or even participate in, in some cases, doing horrible things to people that we would never do to our friend or neighbor or even someone we didn’t know,” Jekielek said.
As language strives to shift the American narrative in favor of death, Christian communicators need to select their words carefully to affirm the value of all human life.
The complicity of the United States
“We shouldn’t be participating in the kill to order, forced organ harvesting in any way,” Jekielek said. “There are few things that are this level of evil.”
Government officials have raised concerns about the partnership of U.S. universities with Chinese transplants surgeons and researchers. While most civilians are honest, there is no way to guarantee that the CCP will not capitalize on those resources and information to advance their organ harvesting practices.
Some leaders, including Jekielek, are raising alarms about developing technologies that might allow China to export harvested organs to other countries which would require import restrictions. Many also want the U.S. to stop exporting anti-rejection drugs and other technologies that are necessary for successful organ transplants to any country illicitly harvesting organs.
After witnessing the eerie speed of his patient’s heart transplant in China, Lavee championed legislation that “barred Israel’s national health-care system from covering transplants performed in China,” according to Jekielek. Several states in the U.S. have passed similar bills to reduce organ tourism to nations with forced harvesting practices.
In May, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China conducted a hearing on Chinese forced organ harvesting with testimony from select witnesses, marking progress toward a coordinated American response to CCP actions.
The House has twice passed bills to address the concern, most recently the “Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act,” which would, according to representative Chris Smith (R-NJ), “criminalize forced organ trafficking, impose serious sanctions, require reporting, deny visas, and create penalties of up to 20 years in prison and up to $1 million for knowingly being complicit in this crime.” The bill has not yet been considered by the Senate.
Meanwhile, Senator James Lankford (R-OK) recently led a Members of Congress letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., calling for monitoring of physician assisted suicide programs. The letter raises concerns that physician assisted suicide discriminates against the disabled and aged, depends on unapproved drugs, fails informed consent standards, and undermines America’s national posture of suicide prevention.
Conclusion
Western nations ought to stand guard against the culture of death that is creeping to their shores and firmly condemn all violations of human dignity in religious persecution and organ harvesting.
The battle for human dignity may very well be won or lost in the details of language that pervades media. Just as Christians rallied to label the “pro-choice” movement “pro-abortion,” Christian communicators need to set a standard of truth by labeling “medical assistance in dying” as “physician enabled suicide” or “euthanasia.”
Every human life is valuable not because of capability, longevity, or even the will to live. Human life is valuable because each person bears the image of God from conception through natural death. The One who breathes life will not let a breath be wasted.
This conflict is ultimately a question of faith and worldview. Will man trust God’s promise that He holds every day in His hand, that Christ has defeated death, and that all who believe will live forever with God? Or will he attempt to secure his own eternal life on earth through the bloody sacrifice of organ harvesting?