A bill that Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York signed into law this week concerns the dead as much as the living and signals a big change in public attitudes about what one owes the other.
The law bans the use of unclaimed bodies as cadavers without written consent by a spouse or next of kin, or unless the deceased had registered as a body donor. It ends a 162-year-old system that has required city officials to appropriate unclaimed bodies on behalf ofmedical schools that teach anatomical dissection and mortuary schools that train embalmers.
The state’s medical schools recently announced that they were withdrawing their opposition to the measure, saying they would meet any shortfall in cadavers by expanding their programs for private body donations.
But the only mortuary school in New York City, the American Academy McAllister Institute of Funeral Services, had been pressing for a veto from Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat. “They’re extremely disappointed,” the school’s lawyer, Brian S. Sokoloff, said on Friday. “It’s unfortunate that the governor didn’t heed their pleas.”
Unlike medical schools, McAllister has no body donation program. Mr. Sokoloff would not say what steps the school was considering to acquire bodies for embalmment training.
But advocates of families too poor to claim a relative from a morgue suggest that many might consent to having students embalm the bodies in exchange for a free or low-cost funeral or cremation. Others point to California’s university system, where an exhaustive donor-consent form includes a mortuary school as one of the beneficiaries.
“The death of a loved one is a time of unimaginable grief,” Mr. Cuomo said in an email. “It is vital that we take every possible step to respect and follow the wishes of the deceased and their family members regarding the disposal of their loved ones’ remains.”
The city has offered at least 4,000 bodies to medical or mortuary programs in the past decade, records show. Among these, more than 1,877 were selected for use before being buried in mass graves on Hart Island, the potter’s field for the city.
The state bill, which had stalled last year, passed both houses in June despite strong objections from medical schools, a month after an investigation by The New York Times highlighted provisions in the old law that gave families as little as 48 hours to claim a relative’s body before the city must make it available for dissection or embalming.
Many cases never came to light because the city declines to publicly identify bodies in the morgue or to name those transferred to medical schools or mortuary classes as cadavers, citing privacy for the dead. But for survivors, the belated discovery that a relative was used for dissection can be devastating.
“That is shameful,” Michael A. Wynston said when he learned from The Times that the corpse of his father, Milton Weinstein, had been swiftly passed from the nursing home where he died to a city morgue and then on to a medical school for dissection in its anatomy lab, all without the knowledge or consent of his widow or his estranged sons.
Mr. Weinstein, a disabled Jewish typographer who died at 67, was not buried for two years.
“Many have been dishonored by the system and families have been lied to,” Barry Gainsburg, Mr. Weinstein’s stepson, wrote in an email from his home in Florida on Friday. “It is now welcomed that such despicable and deplorable policies have been acknowledged and changed by the State of New York. Perhaps, the dishonor has not been in vain.”
The new law was sponsored by State Senator Simcha Felder, a Democrat who represents a Brooklyn district that includes neighborhoods heavily populated by Orthodox Jews or people of Chinese descent, and State Assemblyman Michael Simanowitz, a Democrat from another diverse district in Queens.
“After numerous cases of unclaimed bodies being delivered to medical schools for uses that may have been in stark contrast with the religious or personal wishes of next of kin, this law now makes it illegal to show such disrespect to the deceased,” Mr. Felder said.
“My colleague Assemblyman Simanowitz and I were both aware of heartbreaking cases that pained families, and we feared that these scenarios would repeat,” he added. “Now, these worries come to an end.”
(This article appeared in The New York Times)
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