A brain-dead Texas pregnant woman will not be removed from life support against her family’s wishes because of a state law.
After suffering a pulmonary aneurysm last November that ultimately left her brain dead, Marlise Munoz would have been permitted to die naturally per her wishes in an advanced directive. Munoz was and her husband Erick is a paramedic and are therefore well informed about last wishes.
But the Texas Advance Directives Act states, “a person may not withdraw or withhold life-sustaining treatment under this subchapter from a pregnant patient.”
Marlise was only 19 weeks pregnant at the time and if the arguments for keeping her alive for the delivery of her baby is a hard one considering that the baby would not have been viable at 19 weeks any way. Right to life proponents may want to keep her on life support until 24 weeks when the baby would potentially be more viable outside the womb.
But there is no guarantee. Over the past 30 years, there have been 19 cases of pregnant women kept alive for the sake of the babies they were carrying, but only 2 babies survived.
“It’s our decision that we didn’t want to live in that condition,” Erick Munoz told The Washington Post in a telephone interview from his wife’s hospital room.
He added that a doctor pronounced his wife brain-dead but administrators at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas replied that she has not been officially declared brain dead and remains hospitalized with a serious condition.
“We are following the law of the state of Texas,” hospital spokeswoman J.R. Labbe said. “This is not a difficult decision for us. We are following the law.”
This case hearkens to the 2005 Terri Schiavo case where her family didn’t want her ventilator removed but Schiavo’s husband did and the very recent Jahi McMath case of a brain dead teen whose parents don’t want removed from life support though her parents were permitted to leave the hospital recently.
It’s quite the moral and ethical conundrum.
What are your thoughts?