Now that I agree with. I can sympathize with the parents, but anyone else telling them that the girl is alive is an asshole.
[Nitpick] Marlise Munoz is also brain dead, not in a persistent vegetative state. She is also now in the second trimester of pregnancy as a month has elapsed and the pregnancy is now at 20 weeks, not 14. The hospital is not making this decision to spite the parents but because the hospital believes it is complying with Texas law.
One of the points made in the article I linked to is that judges screwing it up is the norm rather than the exception, unfortunately. They don’t like to play “the bad guy” or feel like they are killing a person (even though legally as well as medically the person is already dead) so instead of upholding the law they issue internally inconsistent opinions like: " Yes, complete brain death is present, but no, the ventilator can’t be discontinued - but antibiotics can be withheld, since those haven’t been started yet." If the cases were reviewed by a higher court, the lower court’s illogical ruling might be overturned, but that almost never happens because the legal system moves slowly enough that by the time the case reaches the higher point the brain-dead person’s other organ systems have failed and they’ve been removed from support, so the higher court declines to hear the case deeming it moot.
Also, 14 weeks IS second trimester (even if just barely), and from what I’ve read, no one knows how much the fetus will be affected. A little premature to declare it never likely to be viable. A baby was born this week to a woman who had been in a coma for 4 months, after she was shot in her tenth week of pregnancy.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/10552191/Pregnant-shooting-victim-gives-birth-after-four-months-in-coma.html
Once more, with feeling: a coma is not the same thing as brain dead. Find me a story of a healthy baby born to a mother who’s been *dead *for 6 months, and then I’ll consider it possible. Until then, knowing a little bit about the physical and pharmaceutical abuse you have to heap upon a corpse to keep it from turning into a puddle of mush, and how most of these drugs cross the placental “barrier”, I’m going with the far likelier prediction that this will not end well.
This is an invalid argument and people need to stop bringing it up. People have the right to donate to whatever causes they want. A religious person isn’t necessarily choosing between donating to Jahi and donating to another sick child. They may choose to donate to Jahi rather than eat out this weekend, or forego their trip to the Opera next month, or reduce the amount they’re contributing to their investments/church/etc.
Does the fetus still have a heartbeat?
It’s a perfectly cromulent argument.
By your reasoning, the person has the right to simply burn the money up (or whatever the legal equivalent to that is). And that’s true.
But that doesn’t make it any less wasteful or stupid, which is the point of this argument. It’s a wasteful, stupid use of money, and while they have every right to use their money in this way, we sure as hell don’t have to respect them for it, as you seem to believe we should.
Does it matter? Even lawmakers in Texas are saying the hospital has a flawed interpretation of the law.
It was purely a matter of CYA that backfired horrendously.
Certainly they do. That doesn’t mean the rest of us cannot be critical of their choice. A person who is donating money to provide “healthcare” to a DEAD PERSON instead of helping actual, living people with that money is behaving immorally. The needs of the living take priority over the needs of the dead.
Unless they have an unlimited amount of money, that is exactly what they are doing. Money spent on one cause is money that cannot be spent on another.
Add to that the fact that if the mother’s circulation was poor enough long enough to cause the complete death of her brain, it’s highly likely the fetus’s brain has also suffered similarly (since it’s totally dependent on the maternal circulation for oxygen delivery to its tissues). The likelihood of getting a healthy baby out of this mess is miniscule. I’d support the family’s decision to try, nonetheless, if that was the path they wanted to take - but in this case, they don’t.
I haven’t read anything more current than at 17 weeks, it did. But I don’t think we can extrapolate from that that the fetus is alive, or will be alive at birth. The heart muscle cells are self activated. Unless there’s damage to the heart, pump it with enough drugs, oxygen and nutrients, and a heart will beat, even if it’s in a dead person, or even if it’s not inside a body. Cardiac activity in the presence of “extraordinary measures” is a terrible way to determine “alive.” Jahi’s heart is still bearing. The dead mother’s heart is still beating. Both of them are dead, with beating hearts.
Plus, and I know we differ in this opinion from other threads, but I think the potential for profound lifelong disability is a perfectly reasonable reason to abort a pregnancy, if that’s what the parent wants. I’ll be surprised if this infant survives. I’ll be gobsmacked if it survives with higher mental faculties intact.
“I’m not dead !”
“You’re not fooling anyone. Get in the coffin.”
Warning: Autoplay!
Headline: “Brain-dead girl in ‘bad shape’ after transport”. Well, yeah, being dead for three weeks will definitely put you into bad shape.
I stumbled on this clip while searching for recreational outrage on Fox News. Somehow I get the feeling this intelligent man of the cloth just would NOT say what the Fox interviewer wanted him to say, no matter how much she tried to lead him.
My contempt is also reserved for the people that should know better, people like Fox News personalities and Terry Shiavo’s family members who have grabbed onto this as a chance to pursue their agenda and are tacitly agreeing to ignore the elephant in the room, which is that this is NOT a case of someone being in a persistent vegetive state, but dead
You are right that soon the parents will have to accept that their daughter is dead. But now their ass of a lawyer is bloviating about how she was “denied nutrition for 26 days”
“She’s in very bad shape,” he said. “You would be too, if you hadn’t had nutrition in 26 days and were a sick little girl to begin with.”
What is so incredibly sad about this is that the girl’s body will not be sustained much longer and the parents will spend the rest of their lives convinced that she died because the hospital unfairly denied her nutrition. And the vultures will feed this belief.
I know she never left the hospital, but there have been statements in some news sources stating that her parents did not follow instructions in the recovery room of the hospital. The hospital cannot confirm or deny that because of HIPAA laws and obviously the parents wouldn’t admit to that.
I agree though that the surgery in itself was risky and complicated by her other health problems such as obesity.
I haven’t had a lot of experience with recovery rooms, but it boggles the mind to think that parents would be expected to give critical care there. When I stayed with my 89 year old father after his heart surgery, I tried to keep him from pulling tubes out, but a nurse was close by and if he did pull anything out it would have been inconvenient, not life threatening.
This hospital, by the way, has a fairly good reputation, though I haven’t seen any statistics on it.
I acknowledge your nitpick and the correctness thereof. The last sentence is also true, but “Texas law” is not some immutable law of nature; as suggested in the article I linked and in other stories about this, the reason the hospital is in this position is because ideologues have been enacting stupid laws.
My apologies for the digression, but I just found it remarkable that this is so much the diametric opposite of the case being discussed.
They weren’t. I didn’t want to mention this earlier, since right now it’s uncorroborated, but rumor has it the family did quite a bit more than just encourage the girl to laugh and talk instead of staying quiet and communicating via the whiteboard. Rumor has it that they smuggled a cheeseburger into the ICU and fed it to Jahi because she was hungry - this is of course absolutely contraindicated after such surgery. The girl choked on the cheeseburger, and the grandmother (who’s a supposedly a licensed practical nurse) grabbed the suction device and suctioned Jahi herself rather than immediately calling for help. In the process, she suctioned away the cauterized/clotted blood at the wound sites which was preventing the tissue bed from bleeding. if (and I stress it’s a BIG if) there’s any truth to the story, the family themselves may be the direct cause of the massive post-operative bleeding. If that’s the case, no wonder they’re being overwhelmed by guilt and can’t let go!
Good god, a cheeseburger?? I did hear that her grandmother suctioned her throat, but I wasn’t clear on why.
So basically they were supposed to follow common sense instructions, not offer critical care. I’ve only had minor surgery, but after having my wisdom teeth out for example it was my responsibility to keep the wound site clean to prevent dry socket. So this was kind of like that except this was much more serious.
The lawyer who is representing them now was interviewed in the paper this morning, and said that he was not going to be representing them in any suit against the hospital. Maybe this is why.
But when I was a kid and lots of people had their tonsils out everyone knew no solid food - just ice cream, as the Cosby bit had it. So that would be amazingly stupid. If there is no trial, and the hospital settles for a token amount, I’ll buy this story as the truth. Until then I suspend judgement, though I wonder why the family would risk their mistake being found out and aired as it certainly will be.
Maybe the grandmother cut both the no food after operations and the definition of death classes at nursing school.