X-Message-Number: 18877
From: "D Pizer" <>
Subject: Your right to self-determination
Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 21:18:54 -0500

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While working on an unrelated project, I came across the following ruling of a 
New York court from 1914;

Schloendorff Vs Society of New York Hospital:


"Every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what 
shall be done with his own body; and a surgeon who performs an operation without
his patient's consent commits an assault for which he is liable in damages."


Apparently this ruling has since been widely understood and used to support the 
legal right to self-determination and respect for autonomy.


What is interesting to me in this ruling is the use of the word "determine."   
In cryonics we have often come up against the legal position that dead people 
don't have any legal rights.  So the state might override a person's desire to 
be frozen quickly at legal death.


But, (it seems to me),  this ruling would allow one, while one was considered 
legally alive, to "determine" what shall be done to his body at a later point in
time.  So this should skirt the issue of whether a dead body is a person.  It 
wouldn't  matter under this ruling, (it seems to me), because if the subject 
made arrangements to determine that his *body* be frozen while he was legally 
alive then that arrangement should be legally enforceable under this ruling.


That right to determine what is done to one's body might override the state's 
right to autopsy and other nasty things the state sometimes does.

Any legal minds out there have an opinion on this?

David Pizer


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