You Can’t Keep Your Parents’ Skulls [Caitlin Doughty | September 4, 2019 | theatlantic.com]
Under U.S. law, it’s nearly impossible to get permission to decapitate and de-flesh a relative’s remains.
Abuse-of-corpse laws exist for a reason. They protect people’s bodies from being mistreated (ahem, necrophilia). They also prevent a corpse from being snatched from the morgue and used for research or public exhibition without the dead person’s consent. History is littered with such violations. Medical professionals have stolen corpses and even dug up fresh graves to get bodies for dissection and research. Then there are cases like that of Julia Pastrana, a 19th-century Mexican woman with a condition called hypertrichosis, which caused hair to grow all over her face and body. After she died, her husband saw that there was money to be made by displaying Pastrana in freak shows, so he took her embalmed and taxidermied corpse on world tour. Pastrana had ceased to be regarded as human; her corpse had become a possession.
So where do skulls on bookcases come from? In the United States, no federal law prevents owning, buying, or selling human remains, unless the remains are Native American. Otherwise, whether you’re able to sell or own human remains is decided by each individual state. At least 38 states have laws that should prevent the sale of human remains, but in reality the laws are vague, confusing, and enforced at random. In one seven-month period in 2012–13, 454 human skulls were listed on eBay, with an average opening bid of just under $650 (eBay subsequently banned the practice).
If there were any legal wiggle room that might allow a person to get Dad’s head liberated from its fleshy shell, Tanya Marsh would know how to find it. Marsh is a law professor and the expert on human-remains law. “I will argue with you all day long,” she told me, “that it isn’t legal in any state in the United States to reduce a human head to a skull.”^[[1] archive.ph/SE19g]