A bipartisan measure has unanimously passed the Texas Senate as lawmakers advance steps to prevent their state from aiding in the Chinese regime’s forced organ harvesting.
Senate Bill 1040, with companion House Bill 2025, would bar health benefit plans from paying for organ transplants originating in a country “where the risk is extremely high that organs will have come from this illicit source,” the bill’s primary sponsor, state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, said in a speech.
It was passed on April 6 with approval from all 31 delegates.
The primary goal of the bill is to “prevent Texans from unknowingly becoming complicit in forced organ harvesting,” according to Kolkhorst, who recalled being approached the weekend before by a county court-at-law judge, who expressed shock after learning about the issue from her Facebook posts.
“I had no idea that this was going on,” he told the lawmaker.
A major victim group of the abuse is adherents of Falun Gong, a spiritual practice for uplifting mental and physical health through meditative exercises and inner refinement, with spiritual teachings centered on the tenets of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance.
A regime-sponsored campaign has subjected the 70 million to 100 million adherents to various abuses, including harassment, arbitrary arrests, forced labor, and brutal torture, in forcing them to give up the practice.
Falun Gong adherent Crystal Chen was twice sentenced to forced labor, both times without trial, for a total of 4 1/2 years.
At a press conference Kolkhorst hosted highlighting the bill on March 29, Chen, who now lives in Houston, shared about being blood tested during her imprisonment. She said Falun Gong adherents were targeted for the tests.
“These tests were not for our well-being because we were also severely tortured,” she said.
Rather, they were “necessary to establish a huge bio-database [for] organ matching”—identifying whether she had a suitable organ for a potential recipient.
“Falun Gong practitioners exercise daily and do not drink or smoke,” she said, noting that their healthy organs have made them a prime target for forced organ harvesting.
“Had my blood type and tissue type been a match for an organ recipient, I would not be able to be here today.”
By Eva Fu
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