Jews and Muslims succeed in bid to avoid post-mortems

By Jerome Taylor, Religious Affairs Correspondent

Bereaved families will be allowed to pay for pathologists to perform body scans on their loved ones to establish cause of death if they object to post-mortems for religious reasons, the Government announced yesterday.

Jewish and Muslim groups have been pressing for a change in the law which would replace surgical post-mortems with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. Both Islam and Judaism emphasise the sanctity of the body after death. Both religions request that a body should be prepared by the family, washed and buried as soon as possible.

Under the new proposed regulations, if the cause of death remains undetermined from a scan, families would have to accept a full post-mortem before a death certificate was issued. They would also have to foot the bill for the scan, which costs approximately £500.