There are some headlines that make you wonder about the direction of our so-called ‘progressive’ civilisation. Not only are our self-appointed moral superiors indulging in ideas like ‘social justice’ (or ‘modern-day witch burning’, as it is more accurately known), Americans are starting to pick up their political thought bubbles from the ethnic slave camps of Xinjiang.

Commodifying the human body: Plan for prisoners to cut sentences by donating organs, writes SBS News.

The story references a Bill tabled in Massachusetts that would offer prisoners the opportunity to trade their internal organs for time on their sentences, with reductions ranging from 60-days to a year. To qualify, prisoners must agree to be organ and bone marrow donors. This changes the system of state-sanctioned punishment from physical detention to biological farming in which your debt will eventually be collected in blood.

While voluntary organ donation amongst the wider community is a personal choice that many people willingly undertake – there is something fundamentally wrong about enticing or pressuring people into selling off bits of their bodies to the State. The socialists insist that we are parts in a machine serving the elusive ‘greater good’, but I reject that notion: we are human beings and must remain so in the eyes of the State.

We’ve all heard of slippery slopes – a slip here leads to the edge of a scalpel.

One of the Bill’s sponsors is State Rep. Carlos González, who – according to an interview given to GBH News – has connections to someone awaiting an organ donation. This would no doubt make him sympathetic to the plight of those waiting for organs. Along this line of reasoning, he has said that the scheme is a way to ‘increase the likelihood of Black and Latino family members and friends receiving life-saving treatment’.

Maybe it is, but this is one of those ‘just because we can, doesn’t mean we should’ moments.

Another way to increase organ donations would be to funnel money into artificial replacements and lab-grown alternatives. These are areas that offer a permanent solution to the ethical grey area of what may one day be known as the Frankenstein Era of medicine.

Governments are always looking for ways to increase organ harvesting. In the European Union, it may even be classed as an obsession. Usually it is done by changing legislation surrounding the type of consent required. Austria has the most brutal of these systems, requiring exceptional circumstances to keep the medical industry away from a freshly deceased body. Australia, thankfully, still has one of the world’s toughest protections on the individual sovereignty.

Regardless, there have been several attempts to introduced ‘presumed consent’ systems in Australia, where citizens must opt-out of being organ donors. They have been met with a near universal stomach-churning revulsion. While European nations have been socially acclimatised to viewing bodies as communal property to be carved up and re-distributed upon death, Australians are not so keen. If they do consent to organ donation, it is a gift – not something that the State feels entitled to from birth.

Frichot explains the lack of enthusiasm in Australia by saying that ‘families may feel concerned that a doctor will not take reasonable steps to save their own life or their relatives lives if it were possible that their organs may be donated to someone else’.

It is a perfectly valid fear. If a hospital has quotas to fill, or there is an individual of high social value and wealth laying next to an ordinary peasant – how much confidence does the average person have that the medical industry is free of coercion and corruption?

‘There have been a number of cases where medical professionals have faced lawsuits regarding organ donation as a result of family dissatisfaction,’ the journal continues. ‘In 2008, a Californian doctor was charged with hastening a patient’s death in order to harvest his organs after telling the mother that there was “no hope” of her son waking up from his coma.’

Presumed consent laws in Europe treat all citizens as fridges for spare organs, including those who have no ability to withdraw their consent. This leaves them as prey for a ruthless industry and this is not something Australia should seek to copy, however frequently the bleeding hearts in the medical industry drip all over the press. The one thing you do not want a doctor thinking about when you’re lying in a critical condition is the value of your organs. Whether the medical profession wishes to admit to it or not, it changes the survival calculation of patients.

Move this contentious and potentially lethal conversation to the prison system where individuals of a lower social status are actively encouraged to offer up their organs in an environment surrounded by criminal enterprises and who knows where the unintended consequences will lead.

The particular Bill in Massachusetts would effectively operate an organ donation program within the Massachusetts Department of Correction, run by a five-person committee. This is half-a-step and a slight turn from the way the Chinese Communist Party views its prisoners in remote, ethnically vulnerable communities.

Advocates for prisoner welfare have quite rightly raised objections.

Takunda Matose, a bioethicist at Loyola University Chicago, said of the Bill: ‘Here they’re clearly trying to incentivise people by offering them sort of reduced sentences. That has historically been a problem because you have people who are in the context where they have reduced freedoms overall.’

There is a world of difference between allowing prisoners to voluntarily register as organ donors, and offering up bribes. It twists the notion of consent.

We saw a similar violation of ‘informed consent’ when state authorities withdrew civil liberties from the population, only to ransom them back at the end of a ‘voluntary’ Covid vaccine.

Sure, these scenarios both involve ‘choices’ – but are they really free choices?

The Black and Pink Massachusetts organisation said, ‘We were shocked to see particularly the incentivisation provision to install an organ harvesting program in the Department of Corrections. You can’t essentially let people sell their organs for freedom.’

‘Any law or proposal that allows a person to trade an organ for a reduction in sentence, particularly a sentence from death to life in prison, raises numerous issues,’ added the United Network for Organ Sharing.

There is no getting around the reality that offering a reduction in a criminal sentence is an unsavoury bribe in exchange for a body part.

Now, more than ever, our civilisation needs to start drawing lines in the sand about acceptable ethical boundaries – particularly around the sanctity of the human body.

While you might not be too keen on the human rights of prisoners – or even care what a prison does with their body – allowing the State to view human beings as a commodity (in any context) to be coerced, sliced, and traded inside a profession that shamed itself during the Covid era, is not a good idea.

How long before we see the State offer debt-forgiveness in exchange for organs? What about a higher social credit score so you can leave your 15-minute city? We have no idea where our increasingly authoritarian and health-obsessed culture is headed.