From the Dallas News: Marlise Munoz, 33, has been completely brain-dead since she suffered a pulmonary embolism after Thanksgiving. She made clear before it happened that she didn’t want to be kept alive by artificial means, and her family wants to take her off life support. But she’s pregnant, and in Texas.
So, I Pit the Texas legislature for being so narrowminded and heartless on this particular point; and secondarily I Pit everyone – including myself, potentially, since I’m posting this thread – who is trying to turn these people’s sad personal story into a far-more-tragic rendition of a Citizen Ruth/Terry Schiavo crossover.
The ironic thing is that the rest of the act (Texas Advance Directives Act) is concerned with the exact opposite situation; the hospital’s right to discontinue extraordinary treatment in the case of terminally ill patients.
After reading the act, I think the hospital’s misreading law rather than the law itself being particularly heartless in this regard. The text they’re pointing to reads:
I’m guessing that the spirit of the law is that if the baby’s fine but the mother’s terminally ill, the act doesn’t really apply as written, in the interest of the baby’s life. When laws are ambiguous or vague, they get hashed out in the courts, just like is probably going to happen here in short order.
Did she explicitly say she wanted to be taken off life support even if she was pregnant? It’s probably not a situation most women would have specifically thought about.
Overall, I would tend to agree with the law on this one. The main argument against forcing a woman to carry a foetus to term is the negative impact it would have on her life. And to be blunt, that’s not an issue here - for all practical purposes, Marlise Munoz no longer has a life that can negatively effected. So keep her body alive long enough for the baby to be born and then shut off the life support.
I’ll grant that the viability of the foetus is an issue. But I’m no going to accept the father’s opinion that “For all we know, it’s in the same condition that Marlise is in” as a medical finding.
RO, with nowhere near the info needed in the article to judge either way.
And what’s up with pitting yourself for contributing to the problem you are so concerned about. Have you considered a 12 step program? I’m sure you could find one in Texas that would be just right.
Is it too late for an abortion under Texas law? And, even if not, can the husband, his wife’s ‘surrogate decision maker’ (or ‘Power of Attorney for personal care’ or whatever) request and be granted an abortion for his wife? I assume not or they would have tried to go that route.
Little Nemo - you really think that a woman who explicitly declared that she didn’t want to be kept alive by artificial means would want her brainless body to be used as hatchery (while she is kept alive by artificial means)? Can people not be allowed to make their own decisions about their bodies and lives without the Government and the self-righteous trying to exert control.
And, no doubt, Texas prides itself in the freedom found there. Yeah, freedom to do what the zealots permit.
Did you not read before you went off on your crazy rant?
It’s a single line in a bill intended to specifically allow health care professionals to pull the plug in cases of terminal illness.
They put the single line in for the situation where the mother may be brain-dead or whatever, but the fetus is fine, which we’d all agree is reasonable to prevent the removal of life-sustaining treatment in that case.
This case wasn’t foreseen by that law, so it’ll have to be hashed out in the courts; no judge has had a hearing on it yet that I’m aware of. It’s not the state so far, it’s John Peter Smith Hospital saying no, and there are quite a few other articles where lawyers and other legal experts say that the hospital is misinterpreting the statute.
That clearly doesn’t matter though because you’re just so eager to get in and bash Texas and conservative people, even if your facts are wrong or misunderstood.
Speaking of not getting your facts straight - no, we wouldn’t all agree that it’s reasonable to keep a woman’s brainless body alive in order to incubate a currently non-viable fetus over the orders of her next of kin and her own expressed desire not to find herself in that situation.
And we don’t know that the fetus is “just fine”. That’s not a fact either. We won’t know for months - at which point the next of kin will get stuck raising the child all alone and also stuck for six months of major medical bills. There’s nothing fine about any of that either.
Not wanting to be responsible for the bill of six months of life support is, all by itself, a perfectly good reason to allow the fetus to die. It’s not like there’s some kind of fetus shortage in the world that we have to force people to care for this one.
So as usual, the Texans and Conservative People deserve any bashing they get.
Do a little more research. You’re not seeing the forest for the trees.
It’s the hospital misinterpreting a single line in a law that specifies the EXACT FUCKING OPPOSITE thing than keeping people alive. The law hasn’t even been “applied” in this case yet- no judge has heard the case, no ruling has been made, etc… Right now, it’s the hospital lawyers pushing their interpretation of the law against the family; no actual legal decisions or anything have been made yet.
The law is NOT some kind of wacko right-wing law specifically to keep fetuses alive at the expense of their mothers. The law in question is one that’s expressly designed to let healthcare providers discontinue “futile care” and have immunity against prosecution or suit. The law would apply to that girl in California if she were in Texas.
There’s ONE single line in that particular act that says “A person may not withdraw or withhold life-sustaining treatment under this subchapter from a pregnant patient.”, and I’m guessing that the spirit of the law is that if there’s IS a viable fetus in a brain-dead woman, the hospital’s not allowed to pull the plug on the mother in that situation. Seems reasonable as a general principle to me assuming the fetus is viable. Since the law’s more intended for pulling the plug, not keeping mothers alive, they probably didn’t think too much into that one line.
Now in the Munoz case, the hospital administrators are taking the most literalistic approach at interpreting that one line that they can. This’ll have to be hashed out in the courts, like all vague or poorly phrased pieces of legislation are.
But for now, the courts aren’t involved and haven’t made any rulings, etc… so quit jumping on people without doing the research.
The law in question appears to be clear and unambiguous on the point. You can’t pull the plug on a pregnant woman in Texas. I disagree with the law, and wonder if it can survive legal challenge…but that challenge may take long enough to render it moot in this situation.
I cannot fathom any other way in which to read that line, bump, and I don’t think you’ve done a good job of explaining this alternate interpretation you seem to be getting from it.
Is it that you think there’s some *other subchapter of Texas law which would allow a person to withdraw or withhold life-sustaining treatment from a pregnant person?
Because I read it like the hospital reads it: there is legal protection for the person withdrawing “life sustaining treatment” from a person, unless that person happens to be pregnant. Because womb occupancy makes a person no longer a person, but a pregnant patient, and pregnant patients are treated differently than other patients.
No way in HELL I’d want to saddle my husband with the burden of caring for an oxygen deprived disabled child for it’s whole life, especially without me to help.
*Can we please stop calling it “life-sustaining treatment” when it’s done to dead people?
Does this law require the family to just suck it up and pay the medical costs? If the costs could be transferred to the state, the law would probably change pretty quick.
I think what he’s saying is that the law normally allows the hospital to discontinue “futile” treatments against the wishes of the family/medical directives/whatever. However, the law was written to say that if a woman is, say, 34 weeks pregnant and in a car wreck and brain dead, the hospital can’t discontinue support even though attempts to save the mother’s life are futile.
I know that when I was pregnant, I would have wanted my body to be used as a “hatchery” if need be. I certainly wouldn’t have had any objection. Were the baby viable, I wouldn’t want someone else deciding I couldn’t be a “hatchery” because it cost to much, or was macabre.
I’m entirely ignorant of Texas law, and don’t feel competent to have any opinion on this case in particular without significantly more facts, but if she was 14 weeks pregnant at the time she entered the coma - would she have been able to request an abortion? Or is the line 12 weeks, which seems to be the more common limit.
Because if she would be required to carry to term while alive and competent, I’m not seeing the difference (in principle, not necessarily in practice) between that and requiring her to do it while brain-dead.
Perhaps, but I would want that decision made by my POAforHealthcare and/or the legal guardian of the baby-to-be, which would be my husband on both counts, not the hospital.
Right, and if I am understanding bump correctly, the law is doing half of that: it’s stopping the hospital from making the decision for the patient. It is not, however, going all the way to letting the family make the decision instead.
And that’s exactly why we’re here in the Pit, isn’t it? The Texas legislature, whether through incompetence or malice, has created a law which has resulted in a yucky situation all around. So I don’t get what **bump **thinks we’re (I’m, the hospital is) misreading. They law says they can’t take her off life support, even if she, prior to the event and her next-of-kin and the fetus’s legal parent to be (once it’s born) and biological father have made it abundantly clear that they want her taken off life support. That’s a stupid, Pittable law.
If they meant, “final trimester, about to be born, probably perfectly healthy and just needs a few more days to finish cooking,” then they should have written it that way. But since they wrote nothing about the fetus at all, they’re the ones who made this about pregnant women, not about very-soon-to-be-babies.
Has Texas had a particular problem with hospitals yanking nearly term dead women off life support against the will of their families?
DMN article about how legal experts think the hospital is misreading the law. The misinterpretation comes in that under Texas law, she’s legally considered dead apparently.
And FWIW, this is exceedingly uncommon; something like 30 cases in 30 years out of all the millions of pregnancies and brain-deaths out there. It’s not surprising that a law wouldn’t be finely tuned to account for something so ridiculously uncommon, regardless of whether Republicans, Democrats, Know-Nothings, Whigs, Labour, Conservatives, Social Democrats or whoever wrote it.
Ah, so it seems the reason they think the hospital is “misreading” the law is that the woman is dead, not terminally ill or irreversibly ill. Fair enough, and I agree.
I would go a step further and say that this law shouldn’t exist to prohibit the withdrawal of life support in a living but terminally ill patient if the patient and family want it, but that’s not what’s going to be tested by this case, should it go to court.
On the other hand, someone else might make a different decision - that should they become brain dead, and the health of the fetus was questionable, they’d want to be pulled from life support.
I’d want the choice - and if I’m not in a position to make it, I’d want my husband to be making the choice whether to keep my body alive for the sake of the baby or to let me and the baby go. Not the hospital telling my husband that they HAVE to pull support because I’m brain dead or that they WON’T pull support because there is some chance of a viable (or even not viable) baby.
Its that funky word “may” in there - along with the “under this subchapter” clause. May is an ambiguous word. Does it mean that “A person MUST not withdraw or withhold life-sustaining treatment under this subchapter from a pregnant patient.” Or does it mean that the hospital and doctors don’t get to make that choice, but if the family does, the hospital is clear to remove life support just not using this subchapter as support.