Who Owns Your Body Parts?

Everyone's making money in the market for body tissue -- except the donors.

Kerry Howley from the March 2007 issue

(Page 9 of 11)

AGR does not price parts based on demand. After all, on paper the Bardsleys aren't selling parts at all. They're selling recovery services at a "reasonable price." Because the same amount of effort goes into recovering a cadaver heart as a cadaver lung, internal organs cost one flat fee: The cost of a heart is the cost of a lung.

Brent says he hasn't made up his mind about whether donors should be paid for parts, but he understands the contention that donors deserve a piece of the pie. "Organizations are standing to make money, and why shouldn't the public be able to participate?" he reasons. But when money is involved, he adds, "the federal government views this as coercing people to donate. We can't be perceived as coercing people."

The Bardsleys have been criticized as unscrupulous simply for covering cremation costs for donors; they are assumed to "coerce" poor families into donating by absorbing the cost of disposal. The resistance to allowing cash for payment, says Brent Bardsley, would be far stronger.

But the Bardsleys do more than most to accommodate families; they're new and agile, making up the rules as they go along. Donor families worry about whether the ashes they get belong to their loved ones, so the Bardsleys have installed security cameras to record the drop-off-to-cremation cycle. Families sometimes want remains directed to certain research areas; when this is possible, AGR tries to comply. What families don't want, in many cases, is to know exactly what's going on-though the Bardsleys will show the facility upon request. "Most people," Brent comments, "don't ask for the grand tour."

Scandal and Reform

During the last five years, scandals involving tissue procured and resold illegally have chipped away at the neat separation between altruistic donation and big business. UCLA, Tulane, the University of Texas Medical Branch, and the University of California at Irvine have all been accused of reselling bodies donated for research. To get a sense of how many lawsuits are currently pending, consider the way corporations have come to calibrate their legal troubles. "Of all the cases filed in state and federal court," LifeCell attorney David Field recently boasted to the Associated Press, "it appears less than five possibly involve LifeCell."

Doctors, journalists, and legislators are apt to blame the profusion of scandal on the pursuit of profit. Calls for reform rarely suggest that donors should be compensated; profit is perceived as the problem, not the solution. In April Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). introduced the Safe Tissue Act, a bill that would, among more defensible measures, require the secretary of health and human services to "promulgate regulations defining ‘reasonable payments' " for procuring and processing tissue. Instead of letting middlemen set their own prices, the government would set the cost of recovering tissue and thus the price of parts.

The bill never made it out of committee, though it is indicative of the quality of solutions currently on the table. Price controls would do nothing to remove profit from the system of exchange; biotech firms would still buy, manipulate, and resell the tissue. While firms may find themselves paying less for donor tissue under such a regime, families would remain uncompensated and uninformed. The market would remain intact and unacknowledged, exploiting donors and their families.

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Xiomara Ortega|3.28.10 @ 11:27PM|#

I will donate my entire body, also the story I saw on TV made me feel very angry about these body snatchers this type of greed is disgusting, these people they don't have mercy, feeling,and most of all compassion for the decease one and the family behind.

Michael M.|8.9.10 @ 3:04PM|#

I love the article. I understand that this is one case that you hilight but have you ever given thought to newborn body rights and how doctors/nurses, etc., try to get parents to sign away another human being's body parts? Each year over 6 million baby boys are robbed of their foreskins and they weren't even asked! Medical practitioners ask the parents who are not owners of the body. This goes against all medical ethics and the philosophy of "do no harm." Many hospitals do exactly what you've outlined in the above article and sell those foreskins to companies to morph them into anti-aging beauty products. Yes, the same company that sells TNS Recovery Complex is getting ladies all over the world to rub a little foreskin on their faces. The family does not profit from the sale let alone the true owner of that body part: the newborn baby boy. You know what is worse? It is paid for by tax dollars in some states.

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