On what are you basing your assumption that she would wish the pregnancy to continue in these circumstances? The person who should be determining this - that is, her husband, who has power of attorney - says otherwise. And, as has been explained to you, the body will rot well before the normal end of pregnancy.
And you’ve still yet to explain why this is any different to any other medical issue where the person with power of attorney would make the decision.
This is what confuses me about this particular line of argument.
You state that the husband is not an appropriate person to determine what his wife’s wishes would have been in this case.
But you seemingly have no problem interpreting her wishes yourself or, rather, having the “state” (whether Texas or the hospital) interpret her wishes in this fashion.
It’s difficult to see how your proposed solution is anything but a post-hoc justification for your preferred outcome. Worse, not one based on usual practices or on what we typically consider the best arbiter for the woman’s wishes - spouse and/or next of kin.
FYI, on the local news last night, they mentioned that the Munoz family is “gearing up for a legal battle”, and then they interviewed the hospital administrator, whose comment was that the hospital’s not in the business of interpreting the laws and that they’ll do whatever the courts tell them.
The state’s not involved just yet- just a family and a rather gutless set of hospital administrators so far.
Well, we can stop all the “Red State” and “Texas” and “Republican” bashing now.
[QUOTE=Centre for Women's Policy - Women's Drug & Alcohol Rehab]
State laws vary in their treatment of pregnancy and pregnant women’s rights are variously protected, depending on the state in which they live.
Automatic Invalidation of A Pregnant Woman’s Advance Directive:
Currently, 12 state statutes (Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wisconsin) automatically invalidate a woman’s advance directive if she is pregnant, as compared to 22 states with such provisions at the time of the Center’s 1992 report. These are the most restrictive of the pregnancy exclusion statutes, stating that, regardless of the progression of the pregnancy, a woman must remain on life-sustaining treatment until she gives birth.
Most of these statutes are brief declarations; for example, South Carolina’s law states that: “If a declarant has been diagnosed as pregnant, the Declaration is not effective during the course of the declarant’s pregnancy.” None of these statutes makes an exception for patients who will be in prolonged severe pain or who will be physically harmed by continuing life-sustaining treatment.
The Uniform Rights of the Terminally Ill Act (URTIA):
The number of states following the URTIA model increased from 10 (Alaska, Arkansas, Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Dakota) in1992 to 14 (Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and South Dakota) in 2011. URTIA requires that a pregnant woman be given life-sustaining treatment if she is pregnant and if it is“probable” that the fetus will develop to the point of “live birth.”
The original intent of URTIA in regard to pregnancy was to limit statutory pregnancy exclusions only to those cases in which a woman’s living will was silent on her wishes. However, the original introductory phrase, “unless the declaration otherwise provides,” was removed. This modification makes it clear that life-sustaining treatment may not be withdrawn from a woman who is known to be pregnant if it is probable that the fetus will develop to live birth with continuation of treatment, regardless of the woman’s expressed desires to the contrary. The New Hampshire, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and South Dakota statutes stipulate that an exception may be made if continuing treatment will be physically harmful to the woman or prolong severe pain which cannot be alleviated by medication.
Viability Standard to Determine Enforceability of Declaration: As was the case in 1992, when the original Center report was published, four states use a viability standard to determine the enforceability of an advance directive. However, the actual states have changed. Previously, Colorado, Georgia, Iowa and Ohio followed a viability standard statute. Currently, Colorado, Delaware, Florida and Georgia use the viability standard. Essentially, viability standard statutes slightly modify the language of the URTIA model, making the relevant point of development of the fetus slightly different. For example, the Delaware statute states: “A life-sustaining
procedure may not be withheld or withdrawn from a patient known to be pregnant, so long as it is probable that the fetus will develop to be viable outside the uterus with the continued application of a life-sustaining procedure.” The Georgia statute
states that, to remove life-prolonging treatment, the fetus must not be viable and the woman must have written into her advance directive that the directive should be carried out in the event the fetus is not viable. If both of these criteria are not met, any directive stating that she should be removed from life-sustaining treatment will be ignored.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t know about y’all, but I’m now rather fucking terrified that I may get raped and impregnated before the injury that puts me on “life support,” until I rot and there’s not a fucking thing I can do about it.
Bump with the latest news.
Based on a statement from the family’s lawyer, the fetus is showing signs of abnormal development, including hydrocephalus.
Take with a grain of salt, of course, but if true, it makes a tragic and avoidable situation even more tragic.
You’ll never know. It’s your family that has to deal with it.
The latest news, if true, is horrible. I won’t deny a small part of me is thinking “zombie baby”, but most of myself finds what is going on disgusting. 
No great surprise there. The mother is brain dead only because of profound and prolonged circulatory collapse, after all. Of course that would affect fetal development (especially BRAIN development)!
Now if she’d been 20-22 weeks pregnant and suffered brain death due to severe head trauma, that would have been completely different. It might be possible to rescue a healthy infant from that situation, since circulation to the uterus wouldn’t have been impaired.
This is a good reason why blanket laws to cover this sort of situation are such a bad idea. Let the family make the call, after they’ve heard all the relevant medical information from the attending physicians.
Well sure. But I’m not a psychopath, I don’t want to put my *family *through that.
That’s just it though; it’s not a “blanket law”, it’s a single line in a law intended (ironically enough) to allow hospitals to pull the plug on terminal patients under certain circumstances, with the idea being that if it was say… the severe head trauma mentioned above, the hospital wouldn’t summarily kill a fetus by applying this law.
In this case, it’s the JPS lawyers who have no balls- most legal experts seem to believe that Ms. Munoz is and has been legally dead this whole time, and the hospital could pull the plug as a result. Instead, the lawyers are being gutless and blaming it on the state.
This is a horrible situation. I swear if this were my loved one, I’d be tempted to unplug something while visiting.
The only good news I’ve heard is that the child will likely be born dead.
The reason this situation is different is because the Supreme Court has decided that abortion is a woman’s choice. Not her husband’s choice, not her parents’ choice, not her doctor’s choice, and not the government’s choice. So unless somebody can show some evidence that she was already planning on ending her pregnancy before her coma, then nobody else gets to make that choice for her.
Let me put it this way. Suppose she had scheduled an abortion. But then before her appointment, she went into a coma. In that situation, would you allow the husband to say he didn’t want her to have an abortion and he was using his power of attorney to continue the pregnancy?
Steophan, I also like to see a cite for your claim that her body is going to “rot”. People’s bodies have been kept physically alive for years on artificial life support.
I disagree with this. If a woman has stated that she would not like to be kept alive on life support - and explicitly stated that included if she was pregnant - then her decision should be respected.
Not the bodies of people who have suffered complete brain death. Bodies where the brainstem and hypothalamus is still functioning can go on for years on artificial support, but mercifully we don’t have the technology to keep completely brain dead bodies going indefinitely.
???
She also never specified she wanted to have blood flow cease to her right pinky toe, should she become brain dead. She also never specified she wanted to have her liver function cease, should she become brain dead.
She didn’t have to. All this and more is logically subsumed under what she DID specify.
Cite? Show me the case where this was decided in the case of corpses.
Worse, as a matter of Texas law, the legislators who passed the law the hospital is hiding behind have already claimed the hospital itself is misinterpreting the law and that that there was no legal issue in their minds with withdrawing life support.
Requiring the need for the woman to have made an affirmative declaration of a desire to stop keeping her corpse warm - even in the case of a pregnancy - is once again a post-hoc justification to push your preferred outcome. It’s not supported by law (neither Texas nor federal) nor is it supported by the way we’ve treated such similar cases in the past.
We get it. You don’t like abortions. But this is one of the worst possible cases to chip away at support for them. And considering the fetus is probably developmentally compromised and probably won’t survive to term anyway, it’s a particularly cruel and nearly inhumane case to practice your misguided attempt at a principled stand.
How is this the same at all? In that case, she explicitly made her wishes clear. In this case, her wishes aren’t explicitly clear - that’s precisely fucking why the husband is the best arbiter for what her wishes would have been.
In the absence of explicit instructions, that’s how it works.
Try to keep up. She’s not in a coma. She’s brain dead. Brainstem not working. In such cases, hospitals have managed to keep some but not all bodies going for a few weeks/months. It’s even happened in cases of pregnancy. But not more than that.
This is totally unlike the Terri Schiavo case. Schiavo’s brainstem was working. She could have been kept going for a long while, though her cerebrum was mush, because her brainstem could be counted on to take care of some basic autonomic functions.
That’s not the case here.
She’s not in a coma. She’s dead. Dead people’s bodies rot, inevitably. We can slow that but not prevent it, and many of the things we can do to slow it would not make it possible to incubate a foetus in that body. Do you still nit understand the distinction between “coma” and “death”?
It is not her decision because she’s dead. It is the responsibility of whoever the choice now falls to, whether the next of kin or the state, to make the decision.
Let me try to make this clear, again. There is no woman to whom that body belongs. She is dead. She, as in the person to whom those rights and responsibilities previously applied, does not exist. She cannot make any decisions, has no responsibilities, and has no rights except those we would give to any other corpse.
But to answer your specific question about the woman in a coma, that’s not how power of attorney works. It doesn’t mean you get to make the decision you want, it means you get to make the decision that the person for whom you exercise that power would have made. So no, the husband could not make that decision absent evidence that she changed her mind. Not that that situation is comparable in any way to this one, as we are neither talking about a coma nor an abortion.
She didn’t go into a coma. She DIED. When you are declared brain dead, you are being declared legally dead then and there, no matter how long they leave the machines hooked up. (I didn’t realize that until a few years ago when my faux sisters’ dad was declared brain dead but left on the machines another 24 hours before being taken for organ harvesting.) This woman has been dead for two months. She is, legally, a corpse. A warm corpse, but a corpse nonetheless.
A corpse has no legal standing to make decisions about anything, not even whether it gets stuck in the ground or burned up. That means she gets zero say in what sort of medical interventions are pursued for her fetus. Those decisions fall entirely to the sole living parent. If that parent elects to decline treatment, that’s his legal right.
Besides, we have nothing to indicate she would have wanted to try and bring this pregnancy to term under these conditions. We assume she planned to continue what appeared to be a normal healthy pregnancy when she was alive and in good health, since she hadn’t made arrangements for an abortion. But we have no way to know if she would have decided to abort in the face of fetal abnormalities, or complications with her own health. There’s no paperwork indicating she would continue the pregnancy. There doesn’t appear to be anyone coming forward to say “She told me she wanted to carry this pregnancy to term no matter what.” That means the only indicator we have about what she would want is that she told people she didn’t want to be on life support.
She’s dead, she doesn’t have a choice anymore. In the case of dead people’s unwritten wishes, the power of attorney should go to the next of kin. In your example, the woman’s in a coma, not dead, so her wishes still apply. In this case we’re talking about, the woman’s dead, pull the plug already.
Well, a Texas judge has ruled. The hospital is ordered to remove life support equipment.
If it wasn’t already clear, the hospital was being gutless and unethical. They did not have the law, standard practice, or ethics behind them.