Is it easy to leave my body to medical research such as the body farm?

I’m Sarah Siedentopf. I’m an estate planning attorney in Atlanta, Georgia. And this is a question that I receive regularly, semi-regular basis, of course, as part of the planning.

We have go through the advanced directive and one of the choices is whether your medical decision-maker can authorize the donation of your body.

So we have that conversation a lot where the answer is, no, I prefer not, but sometimes the question is, how do I go about doing this? It is actively something that I do want to do. Is it easy? And the answer is, yes. Generally speaking, if you know where you want to donate yourself to, it is relatively easy, because I’m here in Atlanta, Emory has a program. So that shows up in my office, again, on a semi-regular basis. They have particular paperwork that needs to be filled out. They want consent from the next of kin. They want everyone to know where your body should go as quickly as possible and to make sure that nobody’s gonna make a hassle about it.

So if you can’t give those consents, then they’re not gonna take you because they don’t wanna hassle with it. But if you have chosen where you would like to go, then you need to contact that facility, find out what they need, and fill out their paperwork as well as letting your medical decision maker, and your close family members, let everybody know that that’s what you want so that they know to reach out and so that they’re not surprised.

And we also run into questions about, okay, if I give my body for medical research, will there be able to be anything buried, anything cremated? And generally speaking, the answer to that is, yes. After the research, the facility program will return your body to your family. And so there can be something buried or something cremated, even though there was research done. So it’s not an either-or in terms of research or being where I want to be. But it is fairly easy, but also hoops depending on which program, and you should always, always, always figure that out ahead of time and talk to the program so you know what those hoops are.

If you wanna do estate planning and include this, we would love to hear from you.