When people die in unclear circumstances, particularly when they are young, the standard practice is for authorities to perform an autopsy on their body to determine a cause of death.
But in the case of the actress Michelle Trachtenberg, whose death at 39 was announced on Wednesday, no autopsy is being performed, according to news reports that say Trachtenberg’s family declined the investigation for religious reasons.
Trachtenberg was Jewish, and autopsies are widely seen as prohibited under traditional Jewish law forbidding the desecration of the dead. Jewish practices require that bodies be buried quickly and as close to intact as possible — hence exhaustive efforts to retrieve biological material in cases where bodies have been damaged. Autopsies, which involve cutting, manipulating and removing tissue for analysis, work against that requirement.
Some Jewish legal authorities have ruled that autopsies can be permissible under limited circumstances, such as cases when dissecting a body might offer information needed to allow for a murderer to be punished, or because of clear potential to generate medical insights that would help others. But others have ruled that the traditional prohibition must not be skirted in any situation.
In New York, where Trachtenberg died, the medical examiner typically requires an autopsy in cases where criminality is suspected. In this instance, authorities said there was no evidence of foul play.
In other cases, an autopsy might be requested, but the next of kin — in the actor’s case, her parents — have the right to say no.
Media reports about Trachtenberg say she was a recent recipient of a liver transplant. Without an autopsy, her cause of death will be officially recorded as undetermined.
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