What This Statute Says
The statute draws a hard line between donation and commerce.
A. Except as otherwise provided in subsection B, a person who for valuable consideration knowingly purchases or sells a part for transplantation or therapy, if removal of a part from an individual is intended to occur after the individual's death, is guilty of a class 3 felony.
B. This section does not prevent a person from charging a reasonable amount for the removal, processing, preservation, quality control, storage, transportation, implantation or disposal of a part.
The class 3 felony classification carries significant prison exposure under Arizona's sentencing rules.
When This Statute Comes Into Play
The provision applies to commercial trafficking in human body parts for transplant. It does not reach the legitimate fees charged by procurement organizations, processing facilities, and transplant hospitals for the substantial work involved in safely moving a donated organ or tissue from a donor to a recipient. Those fees are explicitly permitted.
What This Means for Arizona Families
Donation is a gift, not a sale. This statute protects the integrity of the donation system by criminalizing commerce in body parts while preserving the reasonable cost recovery that allows the system to function. Donors and families pay nothing to make a gift. Procurement organizations recover their costs from the receiving transplant programs and ultimately from insurance and federal payers.
If anyone offers you money, services, or anything of value in exchange for an anatomical gift, or asks you to pay for the right to receive a donated part outside the legitimate cost-recovery framework, the offer is a crime. Our FAQ on making organ-donation wishes legally binding covers the donor-side documentation. The article protects the donor's gift, including the healthcare directive-recorded election, from being commodified.