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Cut up and leased out, the bodies of the poor suffer a final indignity in Texas (www.nbcnews.com)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Long before his bleak final years, when he struggled with mental illness and lived mostly on the streets, Victor Carl Honey joined the Army, serving honorably for nearly a decade. And so, when his heart gave out and he died alone 30 years later, he was entitled to a burial with military honors.

Instead, without his consent or his family’s knowledge, the Dallas County Medical Examiner’s Office gave his body to a state medical school, where it was frozen, cut into pieces and leased out across the country.

A Swedish medical device maker paid $341 for access to Honey’s severed right leg to train clinicians to harvest veins using its surgical tool. A medical education company spent $900 to send his torso to Pittsburgh so trainees could practice implanting a spine stimulator. And the U.S. Army paid $210 to use a pair of bones from his skull to educate military medical personnel at a hospital near San Antonio.

In the name of scientific advancement, clinical education and fiscal expediency, the bodies of the destitute in the Dallas-Fort Worth region have been routinely collected from hospital beds, nursing homes and homeless encampments and used for training or research without their consent — and often without the approval of any survivors, an NBC News investigation found.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

This is complicated to unravel and has lots of similarities to the Tri-State Crematory Scandal.

Who owns a dead body? Does the state? Does the family? Take religion out of the picture for a few minutes as well so we can properly separate church and state. Someone dies without (available at that moment) relatives or a will defining what happens with the body. Alternatively someone dies and has not actually paid for the stuff stipulated in their will and does not have the resources to do so. What should happen? Something possibly like, in order,

The family owns the body
The facility where the person died owns the dead body
The state owns the body if those fall through

Dead bodies can’t just sit around. They can cause serious health and environmental problems if not properly disposed of, so something has to be done. Remember, we’ve set aside religion, so a dead body is literally just a resource. It can be turned into cremains, it can be buried, or it can be sold for various uses. What should the state regulate here? What’s wrong with the state turning a dead body into some money? How much responsibility do families have in respecting last wishes? How much time and effort should the state put into investigating those? Do dead bodies really matter? How much land are we willing to turn over to cemeteries today? In ten years? In one hundred years?

Now if you bore with me this long and agree that dead bodies can be sold, I also strongly feel like there should be compensation to these families with interest for that shit. If you steal my resources and don’t tell me, the state already requires repayment. That’s what should happen here. It gets murkier once you add religion back in because you can’t really undo a lot of these things.

Dallas County is doing something wrong. But it’s way more complicated underneath the hood than normal Texas government shenanigans.