Through murky Waters: When grave robbing saves lives
You don’t need your kidney when you’re six feet underground
By Alex Sirney, senior writer
Posted on October 23, 2006

No one knows what happens to his or her consciousness after they die, but most people feel they are reasonably sure what happens to their bodies. Of course, no one is around to see what happens to their corpses, and, as a New York case shows, there can be pit stops on the way to the casket.

Seven undertakers have admitted to stealing body parts from corpses in the New York area and reselling the bones, tendons and skin for medical procedures in the United States and United Kingdom. As horrific as these ghoulish crimes were and are, their occurrence (and others like them) point to a greater problem — the need for tissue and organ donations.

In the United States, it has been estimated that 30 to 40 percent of possible donors have exercised the option through their states, according to the New York Times. These numbers are further reduced because the United States requires an individual to have died of brain failure and to be healthy enough generally to donate organs. These conditions serve to leave the donor pool drastically short of the 93,256 patients waiting as of Friday on organs in the United States, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, an online organization that manages donors and recipients.

This need cannot be met through the policies currently in place. The National Institute of Medicine has recommended that the eligibility for donors be extended to those who die of cardiac arrest as well. This would be a good first step, but to truly meet the needs of the critically ill, the United States should do away with voluntary donors and instead assume all citizens to be eligible, assuming the proper health at the time of death, for organ donation.

Once a person dies, they should be legally held to have surrendered all rights to their organs. The family deserves the right to their corporeal form, but not to the inner parts that could instead be used to save another life. There is no moral reason why a person should be assumed to have sole right over their body’s tissues, especially after their death.

The California Supreme Court (Moore v. Regents of the University of California) and a U.S. District Court (Greenberg v. Miami Children’s Hospital Research Institute) have already ruled that even a living person has no control over how his or her tissues are used in medical research once they have been donated. It is not unreasonable to extend this to apply to all situations where an individual has no further use for their tissue — it should then become open to donation to the medical community.

This isn’t to say that entire bodies should be recycled since the family still has a right to have a body to mourn, or that organ, tissue or even blood donations should be compellable from living individuals — as long as you are using your body, it is your sovereign property. Once, however, a person no longer has need of his or her body, it should be legally required that any usable organs or bones — not skin, eyes, or other external organs that could disturb a family at the funeral — be transplanted.

This is not an unprecedented proposal — in Europe, some countries operate under an implied consent law where an individual is assumed to be an organ donor unless they sign a paper to opt out. This type of policy, or the more extreme proposal outlined above, would serve to save lives without any negative repercussions — it would simply save so many perfectly good organs from rotting in the ground.

Alex Sirney is a senior anthropology and SMAD major.