Legal Battle Over Frozen Head

A nurse, Mary Robbins, had a contract with Alcor to have her head frozen, but her family is suing. The details in the AP article are sketchy, but it sounds as though the family is trying to get at a $50,000 annuity that was supposed to pay for cryopreservation. Blood relationships are given entirely too much value by our legal system. For every deeply connected, loving family there are ten that treat one another as means to an end, each member sitting around waiting for inheritance they neither deserve nor respect.

I am a cryonics skeptic, but a contract is a contract and this legal battle shouldn’t be happening. I don’t care what your will says, it should be honored to the fullest extent possible. Wanting one’s ashes shot into space on a rocket or to have one’s corpse in tombed in a marble pyramid are just as reasonable as wanting one’s head frozen. If the documents were legal a year ago and there is no countervailing documentation, she should be frozen. Furthermore, a claim as dubious as the one Robbins’ family is making wouldn’t even be considered in a more traditional inheritance battle. In the unlikely case that cryonics does work, Robbins will have been robbed of an invaluable good. Horrible.