The recent story of a 14 year-old girl who died of cancer and who fought to be cryopreserved rather than buried is sparking debates about how Catholics should view this bizarre practice.
The Daily Mail is reporting on a recent court ruling in the UK which granted the teen’s dying wish of being cryopreserved with the hopes that her cancer would one day be cured and she could be “woken up.” While the girl’s mother agreed to allow it, her father, who is also battling cancer, refused because of the high cost and the brutal process of preservation that experts say does not work.
“Even if the treatment is successful and she is brought back to life in, let’s say, 200 years, she may not find any relative and she might not remember things,” the father argued in court. “She may be left in a desperate situation – given that she is still only 14-years-old – and will be in the United States of America.”
However, the girl, known only as J.S. in court papers, insisted and wrote an impassioned letter to the judge begging for the right to have her body frozen instead of buried.
“I have been asked to explain why I want this unusual thing done,” she wrote. “I’m only 14 years old and I don’t want to die, but I know I am going to. I think being cryo-preserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up, even in hundreds of years’ time. I don’t want to be buried underground. I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they might find a cure for my cancer and wake me up. I want to have this chance. This is my wish.”
Justice Peter Jackson, who visited the girl when she was on her deathbed, said he was moved by the “valiant way” she faced her predicament.
His decision to allow her to be cryopreserved was made just a week before she died.
After her death, her body was quickly prepared for cryopreservation which entails packing the body in dry ice and injecting it with chemicals to reduce blood clotting. The girl’s body was then flown to the Cryonics Institute near Detroit, one of two cryo-facilities in the U.S. where her body was placed in a computer controlled cooling chamber to cool to liquid nitrogen temperature, around -321 degrees Farenheit. Compounds similar to anti-freeze are injected into the corpse to stop cells from being damaged. The body is then placed in a cryostat for long-term cryonic storage.
This procedure, which can cost anywhere from $35,000 to $200,000, comes with no guarantee that it works. Experts say that organs such as the heart and kidneys have never been successfully frozen and thawed so it is not likely that a whole body, including the brain, could be restored. The damage caused by the freezing process is considered to be irreversible.
Cryonics admits as much on its website in a statement meant to reassure potential patients: “ . . . [T]he success of cryonics does not depend on the status of current cryopreservation technology. We believe that the damage caused by current cryopreservation is limited and can someday be repaired in the future. Molecular repair technologies like nanotechnology will provide techniques in the future that are not available today.”
Believers in the process say people can be stored indefinitely, even for centuries, but medical experts say once cells are damaged during freezing they turn to “mush.” They could not be converted back to living tissue any more than a scrambled egg could be turned back to a raw egg.
Regardless of the risks, around 250 people are currently cryo-preserved in the U.S.
In an article recently appearing in the Catholic Herald, author Jonathon Wright says that at first glance, cryogenics might appear to raise troubling theological questions such as what happens to the soul while the body is in a frozen state. However, a closer look reveals that no substantive moral dilemma or religious quandary exists because there is simply no chance that J.S. and others like her will ever be revived.
“To be blunt, those bodies in the shiny facilities are dead and the souls have moved on to new pastures. If cryonics makes staggering and unanticipated advances then we will have to revisit this issue, but isn’t it much more likely that, well ahead of such a moment (which may never arrive), we will have located cures for the diseases that force many people into cryogenic decisions in the first place?” Wright asks.
“I don’t believe that everyone who considers cryonic solutions is seeking immortality. They just want to prolong life or live without terrible pain or suffering. Blameless, certainly, was the disease-ravaged and desperate fourteen-year-old girl with such modest aspirations. Those who do want to live forever on the third rock from the sun are in a different, deluded category, however, and their refusal to accept the inevitable robs them of the chance to explore the possibility of another kind of eternity.”
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