Undertaken With Love
A Home Funeral Guide for Congregations and Communities
Chapter 3: Finding the Law
Additional Resources
Here is our directory of state-by-state home funeral law resources, which we continually update as we learn of changes and additional resources.
In most states, laws pertaining to the care of the dead are found either in a health section of the statutes or in a section pertaining to occupations or licensing. Quite often, laws governing other aspects of the funeral industry, such as cemeteries, are in a different section. Nearly all states have laws that establish regulatory bodies for supervising funeral homes, crematories and cemeteries. These bodies generally establish regulations related to the laws carried in the statutes as they go about their work in enforcing statutes.
States That Restrict A Family's Right to Care for Its Own Dead
Presently, six states restrict a family's right to care for its own dead: Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska and New York. Even in these states, if death occurs at home, you don't have to call a funeral director immediately. You can take the time to gather beside the body of your loved one for a ceremony and to bathe and dress the body at an unhurried pace before you place your call.
At the National Level: The Funeral Rule of the Federal Trade Commission
To a lesser extent, you also should become familiar with the funeral consumer protection measures of the FTC's Funeral Rule. Read our page on how it applies to home funerals.
At the City or County Level: Which Ordinances Apply?
Finally, depending on your circumstances, you might also need to investigate local regulations and ordinances for specific purposes. For example, when it comes to burying a loved one on your own land, North Carolina state law contains no prohibitions. But some city ordinances place restrictions on the creation of private graveyards. Municode is one online source for researching local codes by keywords.
Prepare for Chapter 4
The assignment for the next gathering is to read the next chapter. Your home funeral committee also is directed to and research your own state laws and hospital policies affecting home funerals.
This page has all the tools you need to get started on indentifying pertinent state and local laws. We do hope you will write a document summarizing your findings and then contact us so that we can post it on this site!
You may even want to rewrite Chapter 3, "Finding the Law," so that it is targeted specifically to your state. Our copyright terms allow for alterations to that one chapter, and you can contact us for separate PDFs for the remaining chapters so that you can form a new "whole" that incorporates your revised third chapter. It's OK if you need to work on this for a while. It can take some time to reach the point of confidence that you fully grasp which laws in your location are relevant to home funerals!
As for researching hospital policies, you might very well discover that there aren't any that specifically address a situation where a family wants to retain custody of the body at death, except in the case of infant death. That then becomes an opportunity for some advance advocacy on your part, to smooth the way for home funerals, so that families wanting to care for their own dead don't find that uninformed hospital employees stand in the way.
If feasible for your group, you might want to split the research into its parts -- state, local and hospital -- and assign at least two members to work together on each.