Category: Your Legal Rights

Your Funeral Consumer Rights, State by State

Here’s your one-stop-shopping for all your questions about your legal rights. Funeral Ethics Organization, run by Lisa Carlson, co-author of Final Rights: Reclaiming the American Way of Death, has generously distilled information from the book into simple tri-fold pamphlets. Read more

Informed Consent: What You Should Know When Donating Your Body

Recently, more consumers have become interested in whole body donation to entities that make body parts, organs, and tissue available for research, bio-product development, and demonstration of new devices. A crucial element of this donation process is the informed consent of the family, which should, at an absolute minimum, include a voluntary decision based on full disclosure of the facts. Read more

Was the Funeral Home Ethical?

Are You Wondering if the Funeral Home You Used Was an Ethical One? It probably was — IF — you can answer “yes” to these ten questions: Did you receive a General Price List early in planning the funeral and before you made any decisions that would affect the price of the funeral? Read more

Filing a Complaint

How to Start No one is perfect, including funeral directors and cemeterians. We all make mistakes. If you are dissatisfied with your funeral or cemetery experience, try to settle your concerns with those involved first. That’s how you would want to be treated, if it were your business. Read more

Caring for Your Own Dead

It’s here! Final Rights: Reclaiming the American Way of Death will be published June, 2011, but Funeral Consumers Alliance is shipping copies now ahead of bookstores!

Final Rights is the definitive book on the modern funeral industry. Written by FCA executive director Josh Slocum and Funeral Ethics Organization leader Lisa Carlson, Final Rights combines journalistic investigation with practical consumer advice. Read more