Autopsies can reveal intimate health details. Should they be kept private?

It made me wonder: Should autopsy reports be kept private? A person’s cause of death is public information. But what about other intimate health details that might be revealed in a postmortem examination? The processes and regulations surrounding autopsies vary by country, so we’ll focus on the US, where Hackman and Arakawa died. Here, a “medico-legal” autopsy may be organized by law enforcement agencies and handled through courts, while a “clinical” autopsy may be carried out at the request of family members. And there are different levels of autopsy—some might involve examining specific organs or tissues, while more thorough examinations would involve looking at every organ and studying tissues in the lab. The goal of an autopsy is to discover the cause of a person’s death. Autopsy reports, especially those resulting from detailed investigations, often reveal health conditions—conditions that might have been kept private while the person was alive. There are multiple federal and s ... Read full article.