Eugene Gu, a surgical resident, has an audacious goal. He wants to end America’s shortage of organ donors. According to the American Transplant Foundation, more than 120,000 people in the United States are on the waiting list for a lifesaving organ transplant. A new name is to the list added every 10 minutes.
Gu’s proposed solution is to take the healthy organs of dead fetuses and transplant them into babies with fatal maladies such as congenital heart disease and renal failure, the most common reasons patients are on transplant waiting lists.
Through his start-up research company, Ganogen, Gu has obtained fetal organs from StemExpress, which is being investigated by the House of Representatives Select Investigative Panel on Infants’ Lives.
StemExpress takes body parts from abortion clinics and supplies them to biomedical researchers, including Gu. Last year, a pro-life investigative group produced video evidence of Planned Parenthood accepting payments from companies including StemExpress.
In April Congress issued subpoenas to the procurement organizations and abortion businesses in the scandal, including Ganogen, to discern exactly what was going on.
This brought Gu much unwanted attention. He recently told the Huffington Post that the investigation has been a “harrowing” ordeal and that he’s being mistreated by colleagues and professors. He feels “under siege” by online trolls and claims to be baffled by the harassment because he’s just trying to save lives. His bafflement is surely feigned, for only someone incapable of following a rational argument could misunderstand why ethicists, not to mention prosectors, object to the commercial harvesting of human body parts.
Democrats claim Gu is a victim of Republican attacks on science and women’s rights. But the House committee is right to investigate. Federal law prohibits the sale of fetal tissue for profit. The committee has unearthed evidence of just that by StemExpress. Since Ganogen was listed in documents as a customer who bought fetal tissue, it should cooperate with the investigation.
Gu is just 30 years old and an intelligent young man. But he seems oblivious to the implications of his research. He complains about being labeled a baby killer and says the environment at Vanderbilt has become so hostile that he is trying to transfer to a residency program in California. “I have nothing to do with abortion,” he insists. “I don’t encourage abortion — I just use tissue that would otherwise be discarded.”
But for every organ transplanted, an unborn baby must die. And while many of those unborn babies would perish anyway, Gu’s research creates an incentive that is an outrage to his hippocratic oath.
There are better ways of addressing the problem than to harvest the organs of aborted babies. Since far more people say they want to donate their organs when they die than actually do so, a public awareness campaign is needed to close the gap. Another (more troublesome) proposal would change America’s organ donor program from an opt-in system to an opt-out system, which would make being a donor the default option.
Gu is admirably trying to solve a real problem. Twenty-one people die every day waiting for an organ transplant. But he and others should focus their talents on finding creative and life-affirming solutions that don’t involve violating their most solemn oath.
