Killed to Order by Jan Jekielek

🖨️ Print post

Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary
By Jan Jekielek
Skyhorse Publishing

If you are looking for a book about some of the darkest, most evil practices in the world, this is the book for you. The subject is organ harvesting and transplantation—a great dinnertime topic. The main focus of the book is on how China has been forcefully cutting organs out of political prisoners who most certainly did not consent. While I don’t doubt the validity of the evidence and the importance of the issue, it is not my purpose in this review to bang on China specifically. To be fair, the author clearly distinguishes between the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese people, who he believes to be good and noble. In addition, China gets a lot of organ transplant customers from the U.S. and other countries, so there is a lot of guilt to spread around.

But Jekielek brings up a key point that applies broadly to the subject of organ transplantation, no matter where in the world you are—one that I don’t think most people fully understand. The point is this: a donated organ is viable for a limited time after death. Even donated organs from people who are still alive don’t come with a 100 percent guarantee.

So, one might suspect that creates a challenge in cases of something like a heart transplant. How to get around that challenge? Well, in the U.S. (and, I assume, other Western countries), they have come up with an artificial condition called “brain death.” The body is still alive and has a pulse, but the brain is dead. It’s OK to take organs in that case, right?

Here’s the problem. Brain death is an idea that came directly from the business end of a bull. The definition of brain death has required repeated redefinition because some uncooperative people who were diagnosed as brain-dead inconveniently recovered and are feeling much better now. If you want a citation for this, read the 2022 article in Neurocritical Care titled “The Uniform Determination of Death Act is Being Revised” (doi.org/10.1007/s12028-021-01439-2). The abstract is full of acronyms and nerd words but is pretty clear that the definition of death is rather controversial.

In July 2025, a guest essay appeared in the New York Times: “Organ Donors Are Too Rare. We Need a New Definition of Death.” If that doesn’t raise the hair on the back of your neck, you would be a good organ donor.

Whether you agree that brain death is a real thing or not, if it is at all questionable—and I think it is—then you can’t morally justify taking an organ from someone under those circumstances. I think medical time and resources would be better spent finding ways to avoid the need for these extreme measures. I also think that if taking organs from brain-dead people is fair game, there is a lot of fair game in upper levels of government. (I know, this is no joking matter, but that was a joke. . . sort of.)

Dr. Joseph Varon, author of one of the book’s forewords, writes something that is not a joke: “[T]he question raised by this book is not only whether medicine can be corrupted—but how easily. Not through overt cruelty, but through normalization. Not through sadism, but through compartmentalization. Not through hatred, but through obedience and career survival.”

Full disclosure: I find the idea of organ transplant to be downright ghoulish. It is largely the result of an exaggerated fear of death brought on by a secular society that has lost its soul. Be that as it may, the thumb is UP for this book.

🖨️ Print post