Do We Really Own Our Bodies?

My body, my choice is a phrase people throw around for a lot of different things these days. Mostly it’s used in the abortion talk, but I’m not political and that’s not what this is about. I saw an interesting case the other day of a husband and wife who went through something horrible together. The wife went into organ failure and shockingly, the husband was a good match for a transplant. The wife took his organ and then ended up having an affair years later. In the divorce proceedings the man asked for his organ back.
Now, a horrible story, all around, but I was intrigued because the courts denied the man his organ saying he didn’t have a right to it.

I mean…what?

There’s an assumption that what we all carry around with us, that everything in our bodies is ours.
The skin wrapped around our bones, the heart beating in its chamber, the blood humming through its tunnels, all of it belongs to us the way a house or a favorite sweater or a pillow belongs to us.

But the truth is a lot stranger and way more fragile than that it turns out.
Legally, we exist in a place where you own yourself and also don’t, where the law protects your body while simultaneously treating pieces of you like objects to be stored, studied, claimed, or discarded.

If you’ve never wandered into the labyrinth of human body law, brace yourself.
It’s weirder than anything you’d imagine.

The Myth of Bodily Ownership

In the eyes of the law, your body occupies a philosophical purgatory, you might control it while you are alive, but you actually don’t fully own it. You can’t sell most parts of it, can’t rent them out and you cannot legally trade organs or tissues for money.

Meanwhile, the state can (in certain conditions anyway) take biological samples without your consent, store them forever, and even use them long after the original purpose has passed.

So if you don’t own your body, then who does?

This legal jargon is where organs become property, DNA becomes evidence, corpses become “quasi-objects,” and the line between person and product dissolves. Hair, blood, tumors, biopsies, and discarded cells we tend to think of them as extensions of self, remnants of us that deserve the dignity of the choice we have.

The law disagrees though.

The most famous case is Moore v. Regents of the University of California, a ruling that reads almost like a horror story and definitely like something I’d never wish on another person.
In the 1980s, doctors removed a patient’s cancerous spleen and from its cells, then they created a patented line worth billions in medical research.

The patient never earned a penny, and not because he signed something or waived his rights. But because the court declared that once tissue leaves your body, it’s no longer your property. So, a piece of you can be grown in labs across the world, studied for decades, insured, monetized, authorized, engineered…and you are legally a stranger to it.

It feels like extreme disconnect from yourself, where a piece of you has been split off and placed under a fluorescent light somewhere, labeled with barcodes instead of memories.

Your DNA Can Be Collected and Kept Without Your Consent

DNA is the most intimate map we have, it knows the ancestors you’ll never meet, the diseases that passed through your bloodline, the illnesses that might bloom decades from now.
It’s the archive of you, the deep library of all that was and all that can be. I’ve always been passionate about DNA which was why genetic classes at Rutgers spoke to me so deeply. While that class was a headache and a half, I learned a ton that I took with me in my journey as a sommelier and into wine. Yeah, I know that sounds totally unconnected, but if you’ve ever studied wines and went into the history of grapevines or clones you’d understand how they’re actually connected.

In many states, if police collect your DNA (even mistakenly, even if you’re cleared, even if charges are dropped), they can keep it indefinitely. And the legal language is the sample is considered “abandoned.”

Abandoned like you forfeited your claim…even though you did no such thing, even though it came from inside your body.

This is basically how familial DNA matching works and how cold cases are cracked, basically how entire genetic trees become entangled without consent. The law treats DNA like a breadcrumb you dropped by accident, but it’s like the breadcrumb that contains absolutely everything about you. Freaky, right?

When we die, it gets even stranger. We like to think that our body is still “ours,” cherished by family, protected by law, treated with dignity, etc etc. But death turns the body into something legally strange: a quasi-object, not property, not person, governed by a mixture of statutes and traditions.

A corpse can’t be sold, even if the deceased willed it.
Body parts can’t be traded, and next of kin don’t “own” the remains, they only have custodial rights.

Meanwhile, an entire shadow market of “body brokers” exists legally in the United States, where donated cadavers are disassembled and sold piece by piece to research institutions, private buyers, and medical device companies.

Legally permitted and morally disorienting. Also, slightly disturbing to me.

We walk around thinking our body ends with dignity, but in reality, the law treats us like rare artifacts that get passed around once your soul has slipped away.

Tattoo Law

This one feels almost comical…until you realize how weird it really is.

If you have a tattoo, the artwork on your skin may still belong to the tattoo artist under copyright law. This is the reason why when my husband started doing modeling everyone was really happy he didn’t have any tattoos. It also made me feel a certain type of way that I let someone put something copyrighted all over my own body.

This means video games have had to digitally remove athletes’ tattoos, movies have paid artists for permission to show the tattoo on an actor’s body, and public figures cannot freely monetize their own skin without negotiation.

You can wear the tattoo, you can show it in public like repping someones’ clothing line, but the design itself is not legally yours. Your skin is a canvas sure, but the law remembers the painter.

Other Odd Facts

Hair in a brush, a used tissue, a Q-tip, a nail clipping, the list goes on and on, but once it’s trashed, it’s not yours. The law calls this “abandoned property,” once again and anyone can take it and analyze it.

Police do this routinely, so do private investigators, biotech companies and genealogical detectives solving cold cases also are legally allowed to do this. Because the US lacks comprehensive genetic privacy laws, this can happen without your knowledge or permission at any point in time. Hope that makes you feel as warm and fuzzy as it makes me feel.

The things your body sheds, those tiny, unthinking fragments of your existence, become open windows for anyone who knows how to read them.

So, you can’t sell most of your body, like I mentioned earlier, but you can sell some of it. This is where the legal logic gets particularly scrambled. You can’t sell organs (kidneys, livers, hearts), most of your tissue, bones, or corneas in case you were thinking about it. But you can sell hair, plasma, sperm, eggs, and breast milk.

It’s as if the law divided the body into categories based on some morose forgotten moral taxonomy.

The things that regenerate are totally fine, but the things that don’t, that’s a hard no. The line is sort of arbitrary, also centuries old, and shaped by fear of exploitation rather than actual bodily autonomy.

It leaves us in a weird paradox because some pieces of you have a price, others are untouchable, and some can be taken and stored without your consent.

HIPAA protects your medical information, but not in the way most people think.

You have access to your records, but you don’t actually own them. Hospitals and healthcare systems can sell anonymized patient data, or use your lab results for algorithm training, they can share large datasets with third parties, and also allow pharmaceutical companies to mine patterns.

You aren’t paid for any of it in case you were about to rush to your bank account to check. Your illnesses became a part of an invisible marketplace where the people generating the data are the only ones not earning from it.

I hope this article entertained you and freaked you out as much as it did to me when I was researching it.

The Future of Bodily Rights

We’re entering a century where everything about our bodies is becoming data to be sold: wearable tech, genetic sequencing, biometric mapping, neuro-scanners, organ printers, synthetic tissues, the list feels like it’s both never ending and getting longer every day.

With each innovation, the old laws crack a little more.

Will we eventually have ownership rights over our DNA? What about royalties for biological data used in research? Are there going to be biometric privacy laws in the future? How about protections against genetic surveillance? My head spins when I think about the legal frameworks for organ printing and replacement as these procedures become more mainstream.

Your body is your home and your history wrapped in bone, blood, and tissue, but the legal world sees it through a different lens, one built on centuries of fear, tradition, confusion, and power struggles.

The Myth of Bodily Ownership

Your DNA Can Be Collected and Kept Without Your Consent

Tattoo Law

Other Odd Facts

The Future of Bodily Rights

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