British Teen’s Body Cryogenically Frozen After Court Ruling

In an unprecedented ruling, a British judge sided with a 14-year-old girl who died of a rare cancer and wanted to be cryogenically frozen.

The girl wanted to have her body preserved, hoping that one day scientists could bring her back to life and cure her cancer. Her mother supported her last wish, but her estranged father was against it.

The girl then sought a judge to intervene and legally make it possible for her mother to decide what was done with her body.

In a letter to the court, the dying teen wrote: “I have been asked to explain why I want this unusual thing done. 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.”

Her parents divorced when she was young, and she had been living with her mother ever since. The terminally ill teen had resisted face-to-face contact with her father since 2008, and had refused his attempts to get back in touch after she became sick in 2015.

The judge, Mr. Justice Peter Jackson, visited the dying girl in the hospital. He said he was impressed by her valor in the face of impending death.

“I was moved by the valiant way in which she was facing her predicament,” Jackson wrote. “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. 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 her father].”

Her father eventually reversed his opinion and supported his daughter’s final wish.

The court decision had been made in October, but the judge had prevented the ruling to be made public until the girl had passed away, in order to protect her privacy and give her some peace during her final days.

After her death, her body was sent to a facility in Michigan for long-term cryogenic storage for a fee of $46,000, the Associated Press reported.

Danielle Tarasiuk

Danielle Tarasiuk is a multimedia journalist based in Los Angeles. Her work has been published on AllDay.com, Yahoo! Sports, KCET, and NPR-affiliate stations KPCC and KCRW. She’s a proud Sarah Lawrence College and USC Annenberg alumn.

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