Colo. body donation law is a good first step

By passing Senate Bill 234 into law, Colorado has taken an important first step to stop the illegal and unethical sale of body parts for profit by “Body Broker” businesses. The new law prevents anyone from owning both a funeral home and a body donation company. It also sets requirements that body broker establishments maintain sanitary practices and keep records to track the human remains they distribute in whole or in part. While this law establishes a framework to eliminate blatant conflicts of interest and to help monitor these companies’ conduct, it simply does not go far enough.

In recent years, national news stories have exposed the dark, sinister secret of illegal body broker businesses. These stories hit close to our Colorado home earlier this year when Sunset Mesa Funeral Directors and Donor Services in Montrose was raided by the FBI.

Rogue funeral homes, crematoriums and whole-body donation businesses defraud donors and families into donating their bodies under the false pretenses of a beautiful gift to cure disease or to simply honor the wishes of a loved one through cremation. In reality, they are body snatchers who promise that the donors’ bodies will be treated with dignity and respect and used for noble causes, but then dismember them with crude saws and tools to sell the body parts for profit. And crematoriums who promise to provide the human remains to the decedent’s loved ones but instead secretly divert the decedent to body brokers for money are providing inhuman and fake remains to the families.

The FBI confirmed it is investigating whether Sunset Mesa was taking payment from grieving families to cremate loved ones remains, but instead returning cement mix or other substances that were not even human to the families.

Illegal body brokers are a rapidly growing multimilliondollar “underground” industry that must be stopped. The biggest problem today is that there is not much oversight or accountability for body broker misconduct in the United States. By enacting this new law, Colorado is starting to change that.

Unlike living organ donation, which is highly regulated and overseen by the government, after-death whole body donation is not at all regulated. Given the lucrative market for body parts, the pressure is enormous for these body broker businesses to acquire as many bodies as possible by any means necessary. As a result, illegal body brokers have, in the name of naked greed, engaged in fraudulent schemes to trick families and donors. Through obfuscation, confusion and even outright lies, they get the bodies they need to feed the beast of their illegal business model.

What we need now are simple, common-sense laws that hold these companies accountable for how they run their businesses. The laws should require all body donation companies to keep complete records, be fully transparent about what will be done with the bodies upon donation, and disclose to families how the donor’s body was actually used. The laws should establish standards of care and create strict penalties for body brokers that break the rules. All body brokers need to be accountable to some governmental authority for exactly how bodies are used, with full proof of informed consent from the donor or the donor’s families for that use. Only then can the illegal trafficking in human body parts by body brokers truly be stopped.

While Colorado’s new law is a step in the right direction, it does not go far enough to ensure that family members will never again have to suffer the fate of learning that a loved one’s last wishes were violated. It is time for real change. Nothing is worse than families learning that the remains of their loved ones aren’t even human, or that their loved one’s body that was donated for cancer research was instead used to train police attack dogs, or as a crash test dummy by the military, or as a corpse on a TV show. All of these scenarios have happened and continue to happen all across this country every day.

It is time to end these illegal body broker businesses once and for all.

Michael S. Burg is the founding shareholder of Burg Simpson Eldredge Hersh & Jardine, P.C. Burg Simpson represents families nationwide related to body donation and body broker fraud and misconduct.