Legislative restrictions on the sale of organs, gametes and surrogacy services are often seen as having no basis other than mere prejudice or taboo. This paper argues instead that they can be read as instances of a broader decommodification of healthcare provision established in Britain with the creation of the NHS in 1948. Restrictions on the marketisation of medicine were justified by Aneurin Bevan, the founder of the NHS, and by Richard Titmuss, one of its chief academic defenders, in distinctly utopian terms. On this vision, the NHS would function as a utopian enclave prefiguring an idealised non-capitalist future. This commonsense of post-war medicine was fatally destabilised by fiscal crisis and social critique in the 1970s. Influential comme