A Stranger Life

There’s more.  A 33 y/o woman named Marlise Munoz is being kept alive by a ventilator in Fort Worth, Texas.  Six weeks ago, she collapsed and died from a brain aneurysm.  She was fourteen weeks pregnant.  According to Texas law, the hospital says, she cannot be removed from life support as long as she is pregnant.  Texas is one of at least 31 states that, to some degree, prohibit the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from a woman who is pregnant.  However, if Marlise is brain-dead, she is legally dead, and experts say there is no need to continue “life-sustaining” treatment to someone who is already dead.

Marlise’s parents want the hospital to remove the ventilator and allow her to die normally.  It seems to me that the fetus will have little chance of survival and no chance of normalcy.  There is no rhyme or reason in a law that forces a hospital to do something that is both unnatural and against the wishes of the patient’s family, especially when the outcome is so likely to be dismal.  Surely law must allow for the reasoning of a group of learned doctors in cases like this.