Fetus of brain dead pregnant woman, "Deformed" and "Abnormal"

Well, this is definitely a touchy issue.

I hear about brain-dead people often. My father works at an organ donor facility. And he sometimes tells me about people who commit suicide, or people who are brain dead inside of the ICU.

But, I'm getting a little off topic.

Anyway, the article states that the women was without oxygen for a 'indeterminate' amount of time. And as a result, the baby would also be deprived of oxygen. And this is not something that you cannot recover from. After around 10-15 minutes, you are pretty much doomed. Serious brain damage would occur. Not to mention that the mother is basically dead. And that doesn't help the situation one bit.

So, for the people who are saying "He/she still has a chance." It doesn't seem very likely at all, maybe even impossible. The child was deprived of oxygen for a lengthy amount of time and the word "indeterminate" doesn't sound very hopeful. And they say that she is about 22 weeks pregnant. That's only about half way. So speaking realistically, it doesn't seem like this child will be born "normal." Far from it. And if you ask me, the best thing to do would just to let it go.

A Texas judge ordered a hospital on Friday to remove a pregnant and brain-dead woman from respirators and ventilators by 5 p.m. Monday..
www.cnn.com...
It's over,they will finally RIP..

reply to post by muse7


Seriously messed up situation made worse by complete incompetence and what seems a basketcase of idiots and there believes and laws. The woman is dead, she even said if worse comes to worse she would not want to be kept alive, and the baby even if it survives would have a multitude of problems. And that's a if!

And as sad as that is you cant overlook facts like that just because of some silly religion or because some people have a believe. If the baby was looking healthy and looked like it would make in relative good shape. Then ya! Why not! But from all that's been said and written that does not seem to be the case at all.

reply to post by galadofwarthethird


here is a quote from the husband from the update:

In an affidavit filed Thursday in court, Erick Munoz said little to him now is recognizable about Marlise. Her bones crack when her stiff limbs move. Her usual scent has been replaced by the "smell of death." And her once lively eyes have become "soulless."

how horrible is that.................That poor husband and her parents.....no way the fetus is viable...those who say the fetus deserves a chance are in DENIAL..


looks like things will be resolved by monday...

reply to post by followingpythagoras


Thanks for the correction and I'm sorry I said that. I commend you for being so compassionate. I guess my family's treatment towards me made me feel this way. I've been made to feel worthless and a burden. It's like I'm dead. Trust me if I was to fall downstairs and die, they wouldn't notice for a few weeks, if that. I fall about 6 times a year and calling for my children who live close to come get me up, won't happen. If it does, they just give me # for falling down and called me a liar when i said i broke my hip. I have to keep calling 911. I'm abusing the emergency system. It's embarrassing.
I wasn't born this way so I have something to compare it to.

reply to post by Year1

The baby deserves an opportunity. The baby deserves compassion and mercy. What I see is that people are viewing the purposeful killing of him to be the 'merciful thing' in this situation, and in doing so, they send a very powerful message to every deformed or disabled person out there in this world - you are not worthy of life in our world.

Yes but its like this, it seems serious, and they did not say much in the link, and I dont think were going to be talking about walking with a limp, or being a bit underdeveloped, and having all kinds of problems like lung and heart problems which by themselfs is bad enough. They even said the baby is so malformed they cant even tell if its a boy or girl and that deprivement of oxygen at a most critical time in its development is really not good, really not good. There is a possibility if the baby is born it could be literally in a vegetable state like its deceased mother. And if it does survive. For how long, for all anybody knows it could die the next few days after birth or may even survive the next few year only to die of complications the next year ect ect.

I think in such a case nobody should have much of a say but the father and family. Because in a few minutes and days, me, you, everybody who has read this story will move on with there life's. But they and the kid will have to life with the circumstances and deal with it on a day to day basis long after all the feel good crowd has dispersed patted themselfs on the back for a job well done and have long forgotten this story. What I am saying is, the law is stupid, this ain't no one size fits all, and whatever law and else is going on it may apply in some cases, but this is looking that its clearly not one of those cases.

reply to post by violet


violet, I agree you do have worth....sorry for the way your family treats you.....hope you feel you are among friends here... (((((((hugs to you ))))

violet
reply to post by followingpythagoras

 

Thanks for the correction and I'm sorry I said that. I commend you for being so compassionate. I guess my family's treatment towards me made me feel this way. I've been made to feel worthless and a burden. It's like I'm dead. Trust me if I was to fall downstairs and die, they wouldn't notice for a few weeks, if that. I fall about 6 times a year and calling for my children who live close to come get me up, won't happen. If it does, they just give me # for falling down and called me a liar when i said i broke my hip. I have to keep calling 911. I'm abusing the emergency system. It's embarrassing.
I wasn't born this way so I have something to compare it to.

Its a damn shame.

if you live in Texas or New Mexico, U2U me.

This experiment in law and religious philosophy is right up there with Josep Mengele's.

reply to post by SearchLightsInc


A butter knife is more preferred.

In response to your other post, I do have to agree with you about the single dad situation.

If you think raising a severely disabled child with two parents is difficult, try doing it as a single parent. With the way Medicaid payments are being doled out, I don't think he can survive on his income and the benefits.

I just have a feeling that he will have a lot of regret depending on how the decision pans out: He can deal with a loss of a wife and his child, which after a period of time he can start over again or he can live with the fact a state forced him to bend to their rules and now he has to spend the rest of his life taking care of the result.

I found this PDF of how the care of severely disabled children cuts into income as a good read.
Economic cost of childhood disability

Anyone know what the father's income/job situation is?

ETA: I also read on the cnn link above that Erick Munoz has 1 other child, so you have that to factor in with single parent/disabled child

TheToastmanCometh
reply to post by SearchLightsInc

 

I just have a feeling that he will have a lot of regret depending on how the decision pans out: He can deal with a loss of a wife and his child, which after a period of time he can start over again or he can live with the fact a state forced him to bend to their rules and now he has to spend the rest of his life taking care of the result.

Perhaps there will be regret. Perhaps it will be relief that the husband feels. Either way, its at an end as a judge ruled earlier that life support must be terminated by 5 PM Monday. And just to clarify, I didn't mean my statement about him being relieved to come off as callous as it seems to in print. It wasn't a reference to loosing the child but more to the point that he lost his wife in November and has not been allowed to properly grieve that loss as he is forced to watch her shell slowly rot away in front of his eyes as a hospital administrator has effectively decided that despite the wis death they would interpret the law in such a fashion as to force his wife's corpse to serve as an incubator for a child that at the very best would have suffered from severe brain damage and we now know that things are much worse than that. That her husband and her parents are forced to suffer like this while it all played out in court is tantamount to cruel and unusual punishment, especially so when considering the wife's desires if she ever became incapacitated in such a way. An even sadder aspect of this case is that not only did the child not make it, but because they forced her to survive so long on life support, none of her organs are viable for transplant now as they wouldd have been shortly after she was declared brain dead.

reply to post by peter vlar


You don't have to worry, it didn't sound callous to me.

He should just move on and love the child he has now, as this whole fiasco is happening during the wife's second pregnancy

reply to post by TheToastmanCometh


Exactly, the child he still has, has lost their mother and needs all the attention and support he can get and the father simply can not do that let alone deal with his own grieving process while all of this is hanging over his head. If you actually lo at the Texas statute the way it reads is that no dr. Or hospital can refuse life saving treatment for a pregnant woman. Keeping a deceased woman on life support isn't saving her nor are the bound by law to continue treatment for a brain dead patient. The families wishes should have taken precedent to the hospitals religious views.

reply to post by peter vlar


toastman, the husband is a paramedic, his wife on life support was also a paramedic....really good point about not being able to grieve and take care of their other child...just hanging in this limbo....sad sad sad all the way around..

"Pro-life" is Orwellian Double-speak that means one group imposing their will on others.

The government has no business inside a woman's body.

reply to post by galadofwarthethird


Brain death is a term invented by a panel whose sole goal was to come up with a term which could be established in law to facilitate organ transplantation. Organs cannot be taken from dead people - so another category of death had to be established in order to legally take organs from people which then kills them. Because when that heart or lung or kidney is harvested for transplantation, that procedure is what kills all donors. 99%+ of all death occurs from heart failure. It was 100% before ventilators. When the heart stops beating, we all die.

What is coming to light in this case is this truth for a lot of people. The establishment sold us an ethics term - brain death - which was a term to legally take your beating heart which would kill you. This is highlighted dinstinctly and vividly in this tragic case - the baby is not brain dead and it's heart beats on its own. It continues to grow. Therefore, the slippery slope of ethics established for transplantation cases is coming into view here. And so is abortion, which has been redefined in law and in the mind to not be the deliberate taking of a life. And so is disability and deformity. We say that we value the lives of disabled people, but in reality many are stating the reverse by using the 'deformed' and 'disabled' labels to justify shutting off the machine which will end the life of the mother and will most definitely cause the baby's heart to stop beating and will end the brain function. So no, I see a lot of hypocrisy in this case and actions which do not match words .

The decision to attempt resuscitation was made by the husband, the husband who supposedly knew his wife's wishes. Wasn't this whole case set in motion then? What has set in is grief, worries, fears, doubts and second guessing. The terms being used in the newspapers are reprehensible - decaying, corpse etc when in actuality patients on ventilators have lived years and decades. What then comes into play is deliberate steering of opinions in order to herd people into a set of beliefs. We are dealing with terms which mask realities, which blind our perceptions of reality. Not 60 years the vast majority of people knew a baby was in a womb, today many no longer can perceive anything but a clump of cells. Kids still can but then their minds have not been blinded to the reality of these things by the thousands upon thousands of repetitions of 'a fetus is in the womb, it is not life and just a clump of cells". Well, now we have the reality of abortion in this case. A reality for all to see the true outcome of what will happen should they pull life support to the mother. What I see is media manipulation using a tragic case to further divide society. And I see a higher hand at work using this tradegy for good, and as a way to bring forth to our consciences what really lies in our hearts, to bring to our attention falsehoods which we may have accepted, to highlight our hypocrisy regarding our true feelings towards disabled people and to highlight the womb, whose Hebrew root word means

mercy.

I will have mercy, not sacrifice.

The reality is clear. A woman lays on a bed, and her heart beats and her lungs breathe through a machine. And there is a baby fully dependent upon its mother, but in this case, another person has been given that dependancy. It's tantamount to a couple who are pregnant and the choice of abortion is fully placed in the hands of the father and any decision is stripped from the mother. There is a very spiritual message being conveyed through this to our nations. Our lives exist in the Father. In Him and through Him, we have life. Therefore, what do we want from Our Father? Mercy or sacrifice? All of us hope for mercy. If we could understand that doing the will of God - I will have mercy, not sacrifice - comes before receiving the promise, then perhaps more of us might extend mercy instead of insisting on yet more sacrifice. If we truly valued people with disabilities and deformities, we'd never use those things to either support or justify the ending of a baby's life. But we do as a cover for the real culprit - we aren't willing to lay down our own lives for another, we are not willing to give up a few dreams for the benefit of another. And I speak as someone who has had their own hypocrisy brought to mind and taught to recognise it and deal with it.

Our lives are in His hands. We are that baby. There is a reason why this is in the media. There is a reason why the decision is in that father's hands. I fear the harsh calls for this baby's death, by unplugging it's mother's life support, has spiritual ramifications beyond comprehending. Do we wish to have our own cords cut?

This story was going to be tragic however it ended.

Time to shake hands and leave the debate. Poor guy, i cant sympathise enough :/

reply to post by Year1


Some people feel the need to contort the law and the language to justify their beliefs to others.

On occasion I wish many of the members here posted their religious and political beliefs in their signature or avatar.

This family has been through enough already, and it will never truly be over.

Year1
The baby deserves an opportunity. The baby deserves compassion and mercy. What I see is that people are viewing the purposeful killing of him to be the 'merciful thing' in this situation, and in doing so, they send a very powerful message to every deformed or disabled person out there in this world - you are not worthy of life in our world. Is this truly the way you all feel about them, that it would have been better had they not been born or worse still, had had their lives snuffed out simply because of an abnormality? Do you realise that this is what you are saying?

I dont think you realize the full situation. The viability of a fetus that young being deprived of oxygen for that long let alone one left to develop for over 25 weeks in a profoundly compromised mother and womb is not a child.

There is no "opportunity" for this fetus. The doctors and family are the only ones to be making the decision of what is best in this no-win situation.

The family deserves our compassion, not second guessing or imposition of other peoples spiritual beliefs.

The judge ordered them to pull life support.
Judge orders hospital to cut life support from brain-dead pregnant woman

The fetus is nearly 23 weeks old. In the US, a fetus is generally considered "viable" – having the potential to live outside the uterus – from 24 weeks. However, Munoz's lawyers issued a statement this week claiming that the fetus is severely deformed and seriously ill.

"Even at this early stage, the lower extremities are deformed to the extent that the gender cannot be determined. The fetus suffers from hydrocephalus [water on the brain]. It also appears that there are further abnormalities, including a possible heart problem, that cannot be specifically determined due to the immobile nature of Mrs Munoz's deceased body," it read.

"Quite sadly, this information is not surprising due to the fact that the fetus, after being deprived of oxygen for an indeterminate length of time, is gestating within a dead and deteriorating body, as a horrified family looks on in absolute anguish, distress and sadness."

So, that's that.
I think the judge made the right decision.