Arizona joins a handful of other states with a new law targeted at organ harvesting in China.
An international tribunal found in 2019 that China has been forcibly harvesting and selling organs rom marginalized groups detained in prison camps for years — sometimes while the people were still alive. It’s an estimated $1 billion industry.
The tribunal found that China targeted Uyghurs and members of the Falun Gong religious group.
“The Tribunal notes that forced organ harvesting is of unmatched wickedness even compared — on a death for death basis — with the killings by mass crimes committed in the last century. There is justifiable belief in the minds of some or many — rising to probability or high probability — that Genocide has been committed,” the tribunal said in its judgement.
Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs signed a bill this week which allows insurers and the state’s Medicaid agency to limit coverage for organ transplants and post-transplant care if the organ comes from China or the operation is performed there.
Hobbs vetoed a more complex version of the bill last year with provisions about genetic sequencing, which the governor called “overbroad.”
This year’s bill, HB 2109, was sponsored by Rep. Leo Biasiucci (R-Lake Havasu City) and is dubbed the “Arizona End Organ Harvesting Act.”
The bill passed with very little bipartisan support in the Legislature. Only one Democratic senator supported the bill and six House lawmakers.
