Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s signature makes it harder for medical schools to obtain cadavers: report

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Thursday approved legislation which may pose fresh challenges to medical schools procuring cadavers for classroom instruction or research.

Mr. Cuomo “signed into law a bill forbidding the city medical examiner from handing over unclaimed bodies to any ’university, college, school or institute” without a next of kin’s consent,” the New York Daily News reported.

The legislation, co-sponsored by two Democratic state legislators from New York City, was written to “ensure family members get a say in how their relatives’ bodies are handled,” the newspaper reported. 

“The city has offered at least 4,000 bodies to medical or mortuary programs in the past decade, records show, and among these, more than 1,877 were selected for use before burial in the city’s mass graves on Hart Island,” said the New York Times back in June, reporting on the bill’s passage.

The bill passed with just one “no” vote in the Senate and a strong majority — 107 to 32 — in the Assembly.

Medical schools and a city mortuary reportedly opposed the new law, fearing its impact in training doctors and embalmers, respectively.

That said, a group representing the city’s 16 medical schools last week said that, moving forward, they will source their cadavers only from volunteers who donated their bodies to science, reported the Daily News.

As the New York Times reported in 2014, thanks to the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act —in effect in all but two states in the Union — “any individual can sign a ’document of gift’ donating his organs and tissue, or his full body, for transplantation, therapy or for research or education.”