(The Epoch Times)Texas has signed into law a bipartisan bill to combat the Chinese regime’s criminal practice of forced organ harvesting, making it the first U.S. state to counter the abuse through legal means.

As of Sept. 1, it will be illegal in the state for health insurance providers to fund organ transplants using organs originating from China or any other country that’s known to have involvement in the practice of forced organ harvesting. The bill (SB 1040), which was approved unanimously in both the state’s legislative chambers in May, was signed by Gov. Greg Abbott on June 18.

Under the Chinese regime’s watch, the practice of forcibly harvesting vital organs from living individuals for profit has grown into a flourishing industry and has added to the abuse of vulnerable groups such as detained adherents of the spiritual discipline Falun Gong, a faith group with tens of millions of followers that has faced a relentless persecution campaign by Beijing since 1999.

Republican state Rep. Tom Oliverson, a primary sponsor of the legislation, praised Abbott for “allowing Texas to be the first to take a strong stand against the immoral and detestable practice of forced organ donations in China.”

“With this law, we send a strong message to Beijing that all human life is precious and worthy of protection,” he told The Epoch Times.

Oliverson recalled having met years ago with Falun Gong practitioners, who showed him websites of hospitals in China advertising to the world that live donors were standing by as the country’s medical sector looked to attract organ transplant tourists.

“I was just horrified. Just absolutely, unbelievably horrified,” he said.

While Oliverson has worked to advocate for organ transplantation ethics in the United States to make sure that people are voluntary donors, he said he has “never seen a case where somebody who was conscious, awake, and able to sign a consent on their own … was being forced to be an organ donor.”

“That just sounded like something out of a movie,” he said.

He has since worked to advance several other measures, including SCR 3, a resolution that was unanimously adopted in April 2021 to condemn Beijing’s “vile practice of forcibly removing human organs for transplant.” In March, he co-introduced TX HB3914, a bill aiming to bar the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, the state’s cancer research funder, from giving grant money to an applicant who might source an organ from a hospital in China.

Oliverson said that stopping health insurers from putting their funding behind China-sourced organs is key in shutting off such nonconsensual organ transplant tourism. Having organ transplant surgery is so expensive that an overwhelming majority of Americans rely on health insurance to do so.

The idea, he said, is to “basically choke off the ability” for someone to get paid for participating in the abuse in China or anywhere else in the world.

“The best way to be successful in terms of shutting it off is to make it not economically successful for a country that doesn’t view human beings as human beings, but obviously sees them as a source of revenue,” he said.

Oliverson said there’s more work to be done and that he hopes that other states will enact their own versions of this law to combat this abuse of fellow humans. He said he wants to bring this legislation to conferences of state legislatures and present it as model legislation for other states to consider.

“I’d like to see this be something that passes in all 50 states. That would be my ultimate goal—to have all Americans standing united against this detestable practice,” he said.

“If all 50 states have this prohibition, then essentially no American dollars will be going to Chinese hospitals that are participating in organ trafficking, so they won’t be able to pay for it.”

1st US Law Countering Beijing’s Forced Organ Harvesting Enacted in Texas