Economics of Body Parts

Reason Magazine asks the questions "Who Owns Your Organs?" in an article about the increasingly bizarre proprietary status of human body parts.

Body parts aren’t legal property to the people born with them, but can be distributed by doctors, universities, biotech companies, and procurement agencies for profit or otherwise.

Organ donation stands as a sort of command economy of gifting: Donors have little say over where their organs go after they die, and procurement professionals prefer that donations simply go to the centralized donor list compiled by the United Network for Organ Sharing. Anonymous donations are prized as pure, but run contrary to the sort of relationship-building that motivates cultures of gifting in the first place.