If you die in America and no one claims your body — the fate of many homeless and indigent people — the law in most states allows that body to be sent for dissection, research, or the for-profit body trade with no consent from you or your family required. This is not a loophole being exploited; it is the default written into statute. What follows is a sourced map of that consent gap, drawn from the public record assembled in OrganWatch. It names laws and institutions, never the dead.
A default-to-use regime
The American Medical Association's own issue brief states plainly that dissecting bodies without informed consent remains legal in most US states, and that in most jurisdictions officials may hand unclaimed bodies to institutions of higher education with no requirement of prior consent from the deceased or next of kin. A 2019 survey found about one in eight US medical schools reported using unclaimed bodies. The statutes are old enough to show it: Ohio's code still authorizes delivery for dissection of bodies of the class “commonly known as tramps,” and Oregon's uses the language of the “indigent.” Only a handful of states — among them Hawaii, Vermont, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and New York — have moved to require consent. Consent is the exception, not the rule.
What it looks like in practice
In 2024 an NBC News investigation documented how the University of North Texas Health Science Center took in unclaimed bodies under arrangements with city and county authorities, used them for dissection and training, and leased body parts to outside parties — medical-device companies, other universities, and the U.S. Army — reportedly earning around $2.5 million, in cases where reachable relatives say they were never contacted. After the reporting, the center suspended the program and removed its leadership, and the counties that had supplied thousands of unclaimed bodies since 2019 ended the arrangement. Texas then moved to require consent. The point is not one institution: it is that the program operated, for years, exactly as the law allowed.
The body as property — or not
The same consent gap runs through coroner and medical-examiner practice. Some state laws authorize removal of corneas or tissue during autopsy without next-of-kin consent — Florida's statutes, for example, have permitted medical-examiner corneal removal and granted immunity for it. Whether that is even constitutional is unsettled: the Florida Supreme Court held that next of kin have no protected property interest in a decedent's body (State v. Powell, 1986), while the federal Sixth Circuit held the opposite — that next of kin do have a constitutionally protected property interest (Brotherton v. Cleveland, 1991), a position the Ninth Circuit later echoed. The law cannot agree on whether your body is yours.
The regulatory mirror image
Here is the asymmetry that ties it together. Transplant organs are governed by a dense federal apparatus — the National Organ Transplant Act, the OPTN, CMS certification (see the organ-procurement accountability record). But whole bodies and non-transplant tissue used for education or research fall through it: under 21 CFR 1271.15(a), anatomical material used solely for nonclinical scientific or educational purposes is exempt from the FDA's tissue-establishment registration and good-tissue-practice framework. The most tightly regulated thing you can donate is a kidney; among the least regulated is your entire body. That inversion — strict where the organ is scarce and valuable, lax where the supply is the unclaimed poor — is the finding the system would rather not have stated plainly.
What this record is, and isn't
Every claim here is institution- or statute-level and source-linked in OrganWatch's consent-gaps section. It deliberately carries no names of the dead, no families, no case-identifying details — because the people caught in this gap are precisely the vulnerable, and an accountability record that exposed them would repeat the wrong it documents. The accountability belongs to the laws and the institutions.
Companion: The Money Behind the US Organ System — the finances and entity structure: nine-figure nonprofits, the tissue-over-organs incentive, and lobbying against reform.
The data: OrganWatch — the source-linked map of OPOs, the CMS regime, the oversight record, and the consent gaps documented above.
Related writing: The US Organ System, in the Government's Own Records — the transplant-organ side of the same system.