Lax Regulations Allowed Funeral Home to Desecrate Bodies for Profit

A funeral home in Colorado was caught selling body parts of deceased persons to research labs, without the knowledge of grieving families. The case is now highlighting loopholes in the United States that allow such trades to exist.

Despite close to a dozen complaints filed against the operations, the report notes the problems may tie to the relatively lax regulation of the industry of human bodies, which it says has an “anything goes” reputation.

Cases include issues as simple as funeral home employees stealing gold teeth from the deceased, to body brokers selling human heads and torsos while the rest of the bodies are cremated. According to the report, some families had ashes of their loved ones tested in labs only to be told that the ashes weren’t even of human origin.

The Colorado case highlights broader issues that are now coming to the surface in the United States, that human bodies are being desecrated and sold in a billion-dollar market that is largely unregulated. Similar cases that were also recently exposed were related to bodies that family members had donated to science and later found were being shipped to different countries, and that body parts were often kept in extremely filthy facilities.