Brain-Dead With A Baby
Aelyn Thompson
Staff Writer
Lots of controversy has sparked by a pregnant brain-dead mother with a baby who just started its second trimester.
Marlise Munoz had a blood clot in her lung and remains in a brain-dead state within her Texas hospital. The reason she is on life-sustaining treatment is that she is pregnant. Between battles within court systems and their local hospital, Munoz’s family beg their hospital to comply with Marlise’s wishes, and let her off the systems, since she has no chance of surviving.
Texas law does not allow pregnant women off life-support until the baby is delivered, no matter what state the baby would arrive in or what the family or patient has declared.
31 other states in America have similar policies, or have laws restricting freedoms of pregnant women who remain in a state where they require life-sustaining treatments, including Nebraska.
Supporters of these laws argue that letting these women die while still pregnant would violate the rights of the baby. What if the baby is still-born, or is dependent--physically or mentally--its whole life? Would the family still have to cover the monetary and emotional strain, even though their wish to let their loved one move on was ignored in the first place?
The Munoz and other families with similar situations seem frustrated, seeing as they have to pay for these life-support treatments and the potentially handicapped child.
With Munoz’s child still not having reached its 22nd week, the Texas hospital’s potentially denying the mother and her family their constitutional right to an abortion.
Nebraska is among those 31 with restrictive pregnancy laws. Would families want to see their loved ones and remember them swollen and filled with tubes, no matter what their declarations were?
States are denying more than womens rights with these select laws; they are denying families a state of happiness and how they would want their loved one to be remembered. Let the family choose; no one sees states piping up to pay for and suffer consequences from problems they create.
