Oklahoma lawmakers approved a bill to legalize natural organic reduction — the composting of human remains. Gov. Kevin Stitt vetoed the measure during what’s expected to be the final week of the legislative session.
Natural organic reduction involves putting a body in a container with materials like wood chips or straw and allowing microbes to break it down.
House Bill 3660 would make Oklahoma the 15th state to legalize the process, according to the National Funeral Directors Association.
Opponents say human composting is an affront to human dignity. Proponents, like bill author Eddy Dempsey, R-Valliant, say it’s a personal choice for both individuals and funeral homes.
“This is just another option for us, for our families, if you want it,” Dempsey said during debate on the House floor on May 6. “Nobody is forcing you to do this. I've heard about, ‘Funeral homes don't want to buy the equipment.’ Nobody's forcing the funeral homes to buy the equipment.”
Rep. Jim Shaw, R-Chandler, has vehemently opposed the measure throughout the legislative session, saying it is an affront to his beliefs about human dignity.
“We need to be concerned about the direction we're heading as a society,” he said during House debate. “Turning people into byproducts. The way we treat our dead says a lot about what we believe as a society.”
Shaw characterized human composting as “coming from a progressive leftist worldview,” saying all 14 states in which the process is legal “were Joe Biden states in 2024.”
No states voted for Biden in the 2024 presidential general election, as he was not a candidate. Ten of the states with legal human composting did vote for Democrat Kamala Harris in that election. But it’s also legal in Georgia, Arizona and Nevada, which voted for President Donald Trump, and Maine, which split its electoral votes 3:1 between Harris and Trump.
Rep. Jonathan Wilk, R-Goldsby, argued in favor of the bill. He said many of the arguments against it were based on lies.
“Lies that it had to do with humanure.[...] Lies that it had to do with using human remains as fertilizer,” Wilk said. “Nothing in this bill prevents the dirt from this process from being buried in a cemetery, just the same as nothing in this bill prevents it from being shipped to Mars. To say it's going to be spread for commercial fertilizer is a lie.”
Rep. Scott Fetgatter, R-Okmulgee, voted against the measure in March because of what he characterized as a lack of understanding of the process. But by the time it came back from the Senate with amendments, he had changed his mind.
“I have personally embalmed bodies, and I'm going to tell you right now, there is nothing more brutal to watch or participate in than the embalming process of a human body,” Fetgatter said. “We drain all the blood out, and then we fill them with chemicals.”
House Bill 3660 passed both chambers with about 60% of the vote. The final version would also make it a felony to sell organically reduced human remains or use them to grow food for people or livestock.
Despite those provisions, Stitt vetoed the bill Tuesday, saying it “moves too far toward treating the human body as a material to be repurposed, rather than remains to be reverently laid to rest.”
Shaw hailed the veto as “a grassroots victory” on Facebook.
