This article refers to the publicized death of Marlise Munoz's body and the fetus she was carrying at the time of her death. She had been declared brain dead several weeks earlier and was already legally dead when life support was removed.
In January 2014, a judge in Texas ordered a pregnant woman removed from life support. She and the unborn baby she was carrying died shortly after.
In Texas and most other areas, a person is considered dead when they have ceased to have brain function. That can happen for a variety of reasons. Most relate to accidents or medical events where a person is deprived of oxygen for several minutes. In that time, your brain quickly shuts down and if oxygen is not restored quickly, you die.
Once a person passes the critical point of brain cells being damaged beyond repair, even restoring oxygen cannot correct the damage. In those cases, if oxygen is restored quickly enough to maintain the other organs of the body but the brain is already irreversibly damaged, you can end up with a patient on life support who will never wake up.
In the Texas story, this happened. The young woman was legally dead because she no longer had brain function. If medical care had been delayed even another minute or two, she would have died naturally. But because life support was provided in the short window between brain death and organ death, she was revived without the ability to use her brain.
She was only kept alive by ventilators providing oxygen to her lungs and nourishment being provided by IV. In most such cases, once the family has had a few hours or days to process their loss, they hospital removes life support at the body dies naturally.
In the Texas case, the woman was 14 weeks pregnant. Under Texas law, life saving medical treatment cannot be withheld from someone who is pregnant. The hospital relied on that law the force the woman’s body to continue providing support for the developing baby.
The woman’s husband objected to his wife’s legally dead body being used as an incubator to grow the baby. Eventually, a judge ordered she be removed from life support. Her body died shortly after life support was removed. As the baby was still inside her body, it also died.
Legally, the woman was already dead when life support began. Thus, no murder was committed by disconnecting her from life support and allowing nature to take its course. Had medical care not been provided in the first place, the outcome would have been the same.
It was not possible to determine what if any damage had been done to the fetus during the medical emergency. When the order to terminate the woman’s body functions was given, the fetus was 23 weeks old. At that stage, a fetus is not considered viable. The fetus died from lack of oxygen after its mother’s body had died.
If you are curious about the details of how the woman’s body and the fetus were terminated, you can read a step by step explanation of the process. Please be aware that the details may be upsetting to some readers.
