Who decides the woman is “unable to choose for herself”? What happens when some husband files a suit that his wife is mentally incompetent even though she is fully conscious? Or when some parents say that they should have the final say on whether their underage daughter can have an abortion? Or when some man asserts that if he’s the guy who got a woman pregnant his paternal rights are equal to her maternal rights and an abortion requires a joint decision? These are not imaginary issues - attempts have been made on cases like these.
Pretty damn thick apparently.
You decide what a woman’s intentions were based on the best available evidence you have.
In this particular case, we have a woman who was in the fourth month of her pregnancy and apparently had never discussed any intention to have an abortion with her husband or parents. Would you like to articulate what evidence you have that she was planning on terminating her pregnancy?
Found something interesting on the decomposition issue:
I’m not a doctor. But it appears that the assertion being made that Munoz’s pregnancy was doomed to failure is open to question.
This isn’t just a woman who is mentally incapable of making decisions. This is a woman who died two months ago. Decisions made on behalf of living but incompetent people are supposed to be made with their wishes and best interests in mind, but Ms. Munoz isn’t a living person. She is, very sadly, dead, so she has no remaining wishes or best interests. She in incapable of getting better or worse, so she cannot be harmed in any way.
The question may have been addressed upthread, but in the case of an injured woman on life support, not brain dead, but also not expected to survive, does the law contemplate requiring a pregnancy test before honoring a decision to remove her from life support?
Bullshit.
Do we have to address this point again?
The fact is that the manner of death matters. In cases of survival of the fetus, you don’t have a sustained lack of oxygen to the mother. Nor is the mother being pumped full of drugs that aren’t exactly healthy for a fetus, either.
In most of the cases of survival, the cause of brain death is sudden trauma to the head. In this case, there was a sustained lack of oxygen to Munoz over several minutes which led to brain death. And yes, that matters. That significantly reduces the chances of fetal viability, much less the chances the fetus won’t suffer from a lifetime of developmental defects.
I know this has been addressed several times in this thread, and I guess it’s ok to ignore it when it’s convenient.
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It’s not an abortion, even if the effect is the same. Why discuss something you aren’t going to have?
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Would you like to articulate what evidence you have that that the state (via hospital or otherwise) she would like them to make this choice for her in case of her death?
The same way medical decisions are made when any other person is ‘unable to choose for themself.’
If someone is fully conscious and competent and their legal next of kin is trying to have them declared mentally incompetent, the hospital, or if need be the courts, would bring in outside medical or psychiatric professionals (depending on the case) to determine competency -just like any other case.
There is some serious logical fallacies in what you are arguing in this thread which I will address below:
Logic Fallacy 1. Failing to keep a pregnancy from terminating naturally is equivalent to an abortion.
NO, it’s not. No one is ordering Ms. Munoz’s body placed in stirrups and the fetus evacuated from her uterus. There is no abortion procedure being ordered on her body. Her next of kin are asking for natural death.*
Logic Fallacy 2. SCOTUS holds only the pregnant woman may choose to abort.
(FIRST, SEE LOGIC FALLACY 1)
Second, not exactly. You are misinterpreting Roe v. Wade. SCOTUS held that all citizens had a fundamental right to privacy and under that fundamental right a woman has a legal right to terminate her pregnancy for any reason. Since the right to privacy is fundamental the state must have a serious and compelling reason to infringe on that right - which SCOTUS established at viability.
The right to abortion is not a creation of a new right - it is founded on the same fundamental right to privacy afforded to all citizens. Applying your logic to all citizens would mean that the next of kin of an incapacitated or deceased person can NEVER make medical decisions on their behalf - which is wrong, as the next of kin or legal POA make medical decisions on behalf of the incapacitated and deceased every.single.day.
Logic Fallacy 3. Allowing Mr. Munoz to terminate artificial support for Marlise is the first time a husband or next of kin has been allowed to authorize an abortion on a pregnant woman and would set precedence, allowing men/fathers/parents to have equal say in whether a woman may abort or carry pregnancies to term.
(FIRST, SEE LOGIC FALLACY 1)
Second, though Mr. Munoz is not ordering an abortion to be performed on his wife, even if he were, it would not be the first time a husband has authorized an abortion on his incapacitated wife. In 1989, Martin Klein ordered an actual abortion procedure, a real D&E, stirrups and all, at 18 weeks on his comatose wife Nancy, after she was seriously injured in a car accident at 10 weeks pregnant. The court found in that case, while there was no evidence that the abortion would save her life or improve her medical outcome (as Mr. Martin and Nancy’s physicians claimed), but since Nancy had the right to terminate her pregnancy for any reason up to viability (per SCOTUS), the procedure could be authorized by Mr. Klein, as her legal guardian. (Nancy’s parents were also supportive of the decision).
Since 1989, have we seen the courts allow men/fathers/parents to have equal say in whether a pregnant woman aborts or carry pregnancies to term? NO. It means that when a pregnant woman is incapacitated or deceased her legal next of kin have the authority to make medical decisions on her behalf - just like any other citizen.
Notice a pattern here?
*A miscarriage is not equivalent to an abortion though both result in the end of pregnancy. One occurs naturally, the other is an outside medical intervention to terminate a pregnancy from progressing naturally.
That’s kind of the point though; they’ve been asserting that she’s terminally ill this entire time, right up to the point when they have to actually compose a legal document, and then lo, and behold, she’s brain dead.
If they’d considered her brain dead this entire time, they wouldn’t have been able to claim that the state law prevented them from discontinuing life support.
Something’s smelly about the way the JPS lawyers handled this.
There was no such precedent established. The judge just clariified that the Texas Advance Directives Act didn’t apply and that Ms. Munoz has been legally dead. It had nothing to do with the termination of the pregnancy as such; it was simply a clarification of which law applied- the statutes that define legal death, or the Texas Advance Directives Act.
The only precedent that might have been established is that maternal death trumps pregnancy in similar cases. There’s nothing about the judge’s order that gives any decision-making rights or privileges to anyone.
And in the end the hospital decided not to appeal the district court’s decision and disconnected Ms. Munoz from life support this morning. It really makes you wonder about what was going on behind the scenes at JPS, since it seems that their legal team was really not all that enthusiastic about pursuing this case.
The people pushing the “fetal rights” agenda weren’t going to get a healthy, photogenic baby out of this to parade in the media and say “see, we were right to fight for this cute baby!”
Those are legitimate cases for courts to decide. Competency hearings are an everyday matter in the courts. Underage girls have access to the courts to bypass parental control over their health care.
Paternal rights suits are filed all the time. We may be thankful that they are nearly always dismissed. I worry that some day, some jackass (“activist!”) judge will grant a restraining order on a woman’s abortion on the basis of a paternal rights suit. It will be ugly. However, it pretty much would contradict established law, so it’s probably not a dire peril.
In any case, none of this supports what you’ve been saying about the Texas case.
Doesn’t matter. We have strong evidence that she delegated the decision-making power to her husband, in all cases where she is unable to make her wishes known. She married him!
Hell, I even looked at Free Republic – a good number of them thought she should be removed from life support. One guy pointed out that you’re conducting as a science experiment – using a corpse as an incubator to wait and see if a child survives. Most of them thought it was macabre and cruel. Free-fucking-Republic.
And the fact that conservatives support this decision doesn’t concern you? Doesn’t it make you the least bit suspicious when a bunch of right wingers suddenly start agreeing with you?
I guess there’s no point in my continuing to play Cassandra on this. We’ll just wait and see if the other shoe drops.
Oh for fucks sake. I’m finally glad to see one instance where the right finally admits that women aren’t incubators. This poor woman is being denied a dignified death because of someone’s else’s religious and moral beliefs.
I remember when my mom fell into a coma and died. The week before they pulled the plug was emotionally agonizing. I cannot begin to imagine this poor man’s pain at the loss of his wife and child. To drag it out like that for him was just plain evil and sanctimoniously evil at that.
I have another question (not that it went so well last time…): I saw somewhere that the hospital said they would follow normal billing procedures.
Can the insurance company deny the claim because the treatments, etc were not authorized by the patient (or next of kin)? Who’s responsible for forced treatment?
It’s kind of like this one time I brought my car in for particular service. During the course of this service, the shop topped off my windshield wash and added $0.99 to my bill. And I was like, “WTF? You can’t just do things to my car and expect me to pay for it.” And then I didn’t.
I don’t have any horses in this political race - I just want to say, wow, we have the technology to keep a brain-dead corpse going for months? And people actually believe a healthy, normal baby can be born after spending more than half its time with its mother in this condition? Maybe I’m projecting my feelings on this, but people seem to be debating this halfheartedly, like it’s more a theoretical issue than something happening right now, because the baby’s not going to survive anyway.
I also have a slight suspicion of the motives of the hospital. It’s like someone’s saying, “Here’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity - just keep this going and see what we can do. Here’s a legal loophole to buy us time.”
The hospital (or more precisely, the administrators who decided on that course of action) deserves to have the crap sued out of it.
How much do you want to bet the dead woman’s family gets billed for this farce they never wanted?