It has been revealed that the UK High Court recently granted the final wish of a 14-year-old girl dying of cancer by allowing her body to be cryogenically frozen and transported to the United States for storage at a specialist facility shortly after her death. The girl’s mother and estranged father disagreed on whether or not to go ahead with the freezing, leaving the matter in the hands of the court as children are not able to prepare wills. Ultimately, the High Court ruled that the girl’s mother – who supported the 14-year-old’s request – should have the authority to determine what happened to her daughter’s remains after death, and the freezing went ahead. Mr Judge Peter Jackson had ordered that no element of the case should be reported while the girl was still alive, as media attention would have likely been distressing for her.
Uncertain science
First attempted in the 1960s, the controversial process of cryogenically freezing human remains so that they might perhaps be ‘revived’ by future technological and scientific advancements has only been done a few hundred times. A letter to the court written by the girl – known as ‘JS’ – prior to her death read: ‘I’m only 14 years old and I don’t want to die, but I know I’m going to. I think being cryo-preserved gives me the chance to be cured and woken up, even in hundreds of years’ time.’ Both the science and the ethics behind cryogenics have drawn criticism, but Cryonics UK committee member Tom Gibson believes that the promise of ‘success’ is unnecessary for after-death preservation: ‘Cryonics is just a big experiment… You can be part of the experiment of part of the control group,’ he explained. No one has ever been brought back to life after cryogenic freezing, and Mr Gibson rated JS’ chances of being revived one day as ‘somewhere between zero to 100.’
New legal questions
Mr Justice Peter Jackson characterised the case of JS as ‘exceptional’, but warned that firmer legal, regulatory and ethical frameworks will need to be developed if the practice of cryogenic freezing becomes more popular in the United Kingdom. ‘It is no surprise that this application is the only one of its kind to have come before the courts in this country, and probably anywhere else,’ he said. ‘It is an example of the new questions that science poses to the law, perhaps most of all to family law… No other parent has ever been put in [the] position [of JS’ father].’ The Human Tissue Authority (HTA) had reportedly been contacted in relation to the case, but conceded that it had no remit to intervene. It recommended that the currently rare process of cryopreservation would need to be brought under regulatory oversight if it showed signs of increasing.
Sources: The Guardian; New York Times
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