Can the hospital be sued for doing so?
Sort of. It’s rather hit or miss.
It depends. Healthy babies have been delivered from brain dead corpses before. But individual circumstances certainly matter. A pregnant woman who is brain dead from carbon monoxide inhalation and not found for 15 minutes is going to be different from a brain dead pregnant woman who suffered a sudden sharp blow to the head.
The problem is you get idiots who take 1 or 2 successful cases and say “see, we can do this for everybody in any context”. Setting aside the tremendous ethical ramifications, that’s not the case medically, either.
Not to mention the development of the fetus. I suspect that if the woman had collapsed and died at say 36 weeks the husband might have been willing to try a C-section and keep her body hooked up for as long as needed to perform the C-section, especially if that was only a matter of a few hours. But 14 weeks? Absolutely crazy.
My understanding is that her legal time and date of death is the time and date she was officially declared brain dead. Two months out, it seems likely she already has a death certificate.
No, only that even conservatives can see the futility of this whole situation. You’re the one coming up with paranoid scenarios that the pro-lifers are going to use it as an excuse to take choice away from women. Simply because a man didn’t want to use his wife’s corpse as an incubator. Because that’s what they’re doing. She’s DEAD. Besides, do you think it’s any better to leave her on life support, just so we don’t play into the pro-lifers’ hands? Using this woman as a political football is utterly disgusting.
And here’s the thing about being pro-choice: it’s not just about abortion. It’s also about the choice NOT to have an abortion. So by leaving her on life support, he’d STILL be making a choice for her. He’s kind of forced to, since his wife, is, you know – DEAD.
And there is no goddamned abortion here – they’re pulling the plug. Allowing nature to take its course. Her family doesn’t need people like you using her to further YOUR agenda either. You’re as bad as the pro-lifers who want to keep her in because abortion=wrong. This isn’t about setting some precident – this shouldn’t be about “letting the other side win”. This should be about allowing her family some peace and time to mourn so they can finally move on. It’s disgusting. This should never have been allowed to have happened in the first place.
But who would the patient be? They can’t bill for treatment of a dead person (or can they?) and the fetus being only 14wks, wouldn’t it still be considered an integral part of the mother’s body rather than an independent entity?
Interesting question though.
I suspect that in the end the hospital will end up eating hose costs (which is only right, as the costs would have not existed without their interference).
I wholly believe that the JPS administrators and lawyers didn’t want to be the ones responsible for pulling the plug on what some might consider a pregnant woman, and engineered things such that they had a judge make the decision for them, letting them off the hook.
That’s the only explanation I can come up with- clearly her family wanted the plug pulled, clearly she was legally dead, and yet the hospital stuck to their guns right up to the point when the judge made the decision, and then they rolled over tout suite and didn’t even appeal.
Gutless, but it’s about what I expect when lawyers have an outsized voice in organizations that are totally risk-averse and paranoid about lawsuits and certain kinds of negative publicity.
I think we should make an effort to avoid the phrase “life-support”. Mrs. Munoz died. The only thing these medical measures did was provide organ support for a limited period of time. In a less macabre situation, they would only have been carried out long enough to provide the family with time to come to terms with the reality of her death and to support the functions of her heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, and other transplantable organs until they could be removed and transported to recipients.
It wasn’t life support. It was organ support. I think if we make an effort to use accurate terminology, it makes the reality of the situation more clear.
I’m only now catching up in this thread. I know I’m late to say it but will go ahead anyway.
Little Nemo: I used to respect you as a poster. But, if you really believe that those 19 cases had any relevance to Marlise Munoz you are an idiot. And, if you actually knew they were irrelevant (as I strongly suspect you did), but chose to cite them regardless, you are a deceitful bastard.
Which is it?
Ok this is oddly similar: Home | Vancouver Sun
Summary: Canadian couple Dylan and Robyn Benson. Robyn Benson brain dead dead, also of hemorrhage, at 22 weeks pregnant. The big difference is, in this case, Dylan wants the baby.
Huh. So much for this kind of thing being extremely rare.
22 weeks is a huge difference, and I do hope that they have a happy outcome. Depending on how long the fetus was deprived of oxygen - if at all - this one has a fighting chance. They’re aiming for 34 weeks, which is the end of February, putting the fetus at about 31 weeks now. My daughter was born at 23 weeks and 6 days of pregnancy (21 weeks and 6 days of gestation).
This law is on the books in Texas because brain-dead people will always vote Republican, so you can’t kill one of them.
Well, good luck to him. I sincerely wish him well. And that’s rather the point. He is expressing his family’s wishes (which presumably match what his wife’s wishes would have been) and neither the hospital nor the state has jack shit to say about it. That’s what everybody wanted. Not for the fetus to die but for all outside parties to respect their desires.
Also, 22 weeks pregnant is significantly different from 14 weeks pregnant. Rather than requiring 3 months of support, there’s only a couple weeks absolutely necessary and they can go longer as conditions allow. That’s a radical difference in the amount of care required, much less the chance of complication.
And this case happened after how many months? How many millions of pregnancies have not involved brain hemorrhages in the mean time? One case out of millions over the last few months is pretty fucking rare.
The only commonality is a braindead woman being used as an incubator.
Is there anyone, feminists, say, who might object to that itself on principle? It’s kinda squick, but the woman’s choice is no longer a factor anyway, she’ll never make another decision, she’s not suffering, she won’t have to experience the pain of childbirth or the responsibility of motherhood, incubating is the only thing she’s good for any more, why not let her do it and then let her die-all-the-way?
It only becomes too squicky when you decide she should have another one.
“Please understand, Doctor, I know it’s not in the living will, but we both always agreed we wanted a big family . . .”
Oh, so the statistics are 30 cases in 30 years (post 163, I don’t know how to quote a quote). So not that rare to have 2 cases in 2 months. I guess we can use this case to learn more about how soon a pregnancy can survive through brain death.
Good point.
hur dur hurr!
It may or may not be true, but you can’t conclude this from this single data point. Bad use of statistics. It’s akin to selection bias. If it doesn’t happen again for 5 years, would you revise your estimate?
It’s also rare to win the lottery. But some people have done it twice. It doesn’t make it any less rare to win the lottery.
I guess it’s an extra data point, but you’d need a few hundred more cases at all stages of fetal development to make any statistically significant statements. So, we check back in a few decades?
Why so many? Well, circumstances are all different. Things have to go massively wrong for a pregnant woman to become brain dead, and that doesn’t happen in a single way. Nor is treatment at a hospital uniform in all these cases. Nor should the outcomes be expected to be similar at different stages of pregnancy.
Take these two cases.
Munoz - 14 weeks pregnant which was not known to the family until she got to the hospital. Not found immediately. Low blood oxygen for sustained periods of time. Lots of drugs pumped into system before pregnancy discovered.
Benson - 22 weeks pregnant, which was known to family. Found almost immediately hence blood oxygen not low for that long. Hospital care tailored around her pregnancy.
These cases are only superficially similar. The details (which do matter) are significantly different in most other ways than involving a non-viable fetus and a brain dead mother.
Kind of like a heart attack stemming from drug abuse in a 23 year old female vs a heart attack in a 55 year old male with a family history of heart disease. Initial treatment to keep them alive is going to be similar, but the details are really going to matter.
In the meantime, our time is probably better spent working out how to keep the mothers (and anybody else in danger of brain death) alive in the first place. Not that figuring out how to save nonviable fetuses isn’t important, but it’s rare enough and the complications numerous enough to be the work of decades.
And, in any case, again, the point isn’t the fetus but the hospital circumventing the family’s wishes even when there was no legal reason to do so. It was pure CYA in one of the worst ways possible.