X-Message-Number: 18877 From: "D Pizer" <> Subject: Your right to self-determination Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 21:18:54 -0500 This is a multi-part message in MIME format. ------=_NextPart_000_000E_01C1D830.7F521480 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" 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 ------=_NextPart_000_000E_01C1D830.7F521480 Content-Type: text/html; [ AUTOMATICALLY SKIPPING HTML ENCODING! ] Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=18877