On its website, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) states that it is “dedicated to the highest ethical standards of the Oath of Hippocrates….”
The Oath commits a person to various provisions of a professional code of conduct. Today, nobody adopts it fully; for one thing, nobody expects physicians to express reverence for the Olympic gods. But everybody knows and appreciates the part about doing no harm to one’s patients, and we expect doctors—at least, conscientious doctors—to adhere to this prescription to the best of their ability.
In light of such a widely accepted professional ethos, it should not be exceptional news, although apparently it is, when an association of doctors comes out against using medical procedures to systematically violate the rights and destroy the lives of masses of people—as is being done by the Chinese government.
The New Tang Dynasty Network (NTD), “a New York-based, global television network founded in 2001 by Chinese Americans who fled communism,” reports that AAPS “is taking a stance on the Chinese regime’s industrial-scale murder of prisoners of conscience for their organs, urging U.S. authorities and doctors to do what they can to stop enabling the abuse.”
“Overwhelming evidence” indicates that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been incarcerating and committing forced organ harvesting on religious, ethnic, and other minorities in China, according to a statement released by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons earlier this month [July 2023].
The group also called upon the U.S. government and American physicians to stop training or educating medical professionals from China—or any other totalitarian regime—in skills that could be used to commit the abuse.
“We unequivocally condemn it. It’s absolutely barbaric, inhumane, unethical. There’s no way to justify this at all,” Dr. Richard Amerling, former president and current board member of the AAPS, told The Epoch Times. “You cannot forcibly take someone’s organs, that’s the grossest violation of bodily autonomy that could exist.”
The article notes that evidence of widespread coercive organ harvesting by the regime was presented at the 2019 China Tribunal, which concluded that the individuals most at risk are imprisoned members of the spiritual group Falun Gong, although members of many other groups have also been victimized.
