"Is my body and state doesn´t manage it": disposition about the own body in the organ donation in Colombia

Abstract

While the law in the majority of western countries prohibits the sale of organs, personalities and pressure groups have been advocating based on multiple arguments, between them, that the State does not have to control decisions about their own bodies. In Colombia, the State has prohibited the delivery or receipt of human organs and tissue for profit. Respect of organ donation, the Constitutional Court has given some juridical concepts but but it has not had an express pronouncement on the organ trade. Nevertheless, it has made some pronouncements on other topics related to the free disposition as the minimal dose, suicide and hermaphroditism, which by analogy might justify permission the sale of organs, focused from the free development of personality and not affectation to rights of third parties or the public health, restricting state control overthe person’s body. Colombian doctrine, for its part, thinks that the human body is extrapatrimonial, not a thing, but considering that some elements separated from the body they can be sold.