<p>The problem isn’t that nobody includes that type of condition in an advanced directive. The problem is that even if a woman did include that type of condition in an advanced directive, it wouldn’t matter. </p>
<p>It wouldn’t matter if the OB/GYN asked once a woman found out she was pregnant. What if something happened before she knew she was pregnant? </p>
<p>I keep hearing that the baby may be severely disabled. We have incredibly technology these days- have they not done these 3D ultrasounds and stuff on this baby to see if it will even be viable ever?</p>
<p>“Also, again, we do not know if the baby is damaged. I hope that it’s not. I hope that he/she will be placed in a loving home”</p>
<p>Well, I too “hope” that it’s not damaged in the same way I “hoped” that Jahi McMath would blink her eyes open and say “hi mom, I’m here!” - but it is the same kind of deliberate denial that the McMaths engaged in to pretend that there is not a significant chance that this fetus is severely damaged because the mother went without oxygen for so long. Deliberate denial of medical facts and wishful thinking wasn’t pretty in Jahi’s case and it’s not pretty here. </p>
<p>To your point of “well, what if I were a week away from delivery, an hour away” etc.
Don’t you think Mr Munoz has a better sense of what his wife would want than you do? I don’t get how, by virtue of being women who have carried babies ourselves, our own personal judgments of what we would do are supposed to override the husband’s knowledge of his wife. It’s patronizing because it says that we all are of a uniform brain when pregnant. You’d like us to be - your agenda is showing.</p>
<p>“I keep hearing that the baby may be severely disabled. We have incredibly technology these days- have they not done these 3D ultrasounds and stuff on this baby to see if it will even be viable ever?”</p>
<p>Generic brain damage may not show up on ultrasound. Easily. This isn’t a “let’s peek and see” situation. And being delivered prematurely is no walk in the park either. I had two babies in NICU on life support myself, one with a brain hemorrhage.</p>
<p>Wow. I’d say your agenda is being shoved in some faces, Pizzagirl.</p>
<p>And I personally WOULD love to think that a pregnant woman…that any mother….would put the life and well-being of their child ahead of their own. I know of pregnant women who have delayed life-saving treatments that could harm their child so that the child could survive, for example. </p>
<p>I am not speaking to this particular case…I have not read up on it, nor do I know any details that would allow me to determine if I think the child will have sustained severe damage because of oxygen deprivation. I am dismayed by the idea that pregnancy is just another “condition”….in my opinion it most certainly is not. It’s a profoundly unique and amazing situation where one life is completely dependent upon another. </p>
<p>This case in Texas is tragic all around and no simple answers are to be found here.</p>
<p>There aren’t enough actual cases of this happening for there to be conclusions - only the neurological and obstetric community’s understanding of science and the consequences of a fetus being oxygen-deprived in utero. “Time is brain” is kind of a golden rule of obstetrics.</p>
<p>To me, it’s irrelevant (though certainly unfortunate) that the fetus has a high chance of being disabled. To me what’s sobering is that the woman’s end of life wishes are being overridden by the state. It’s no different in my mind than if I were to express that I wouldn’t want to be sustained in a certain condition but the state decided to sustain me to harvest my organs anyway. We don’t do this to men, do we?</p>
<p>A few updates (from the other forum)
A commentary, followed by responses to it, followed by a weird youtube of frog legs responding to salt (warning- its a bit creepy).</p>
<p>As an aside, when I was in college a gazillion years ago, we did a lab experiment measuring the cardiac response to nicotine on tortoise hearts (IIRC we placed liquid nicotine via eyedropper directly onto the heart muscle). These tortoises were DEAD (don’t ask details, please, as it probably would not be permitted in labs today, but suffice it to say they were definitely brain dead) yet we were able to get active, continued cardiac response to treatment with nicotine:</p>
<p>My stated preference is, “keep me connected to machines as long as my spouse wants me to be, and not a minute longer.” To have some hospital bureaucrat make those decisions in opposition to my spouse is deeply offensive to me.</p>
<p>Let’s be very clear, even if this woman had explicitly written that she wanted the plug pulled even if pregnant and signed on the dotted line, her wishes would be ignored. She has less rights dead than alive and that is disturbing and sickening.</p>
<p>That’s an important distinction many people are ignoring. Whether she omitted to consider this possibility in discussions with her husband is irrelevant if state law trumps her wishes no matter what they were.</p>
<p>As I see it, the problem in the Texas case is that the fetus was only at 14 weeks when the mother died. That’s a long, long way from a viable fetus, and, in my opinion, the wishes of the husband should prevail, especially if he can credibly state what his wife would have wanted. I’d feel differently if the fetus were viable, or much closer to likely viability.</p>
<p>I will note that if something health-related happened that made it highly likely that a baby would be born severely disabled, a woman could choose to abort that fetus–in Texas, at least up to 20 weeks. Well, something like that has happened, and the only difference is that the woman can’t make the decision, because she is dead. So her husband should have the right to make the decision.</p>
<p>There is no way to really know what the woman wanted. Yes she most likely really did tell her husband that she wouldn’t want to be on life support. But in her line of work she should have known the law in the state of Texas and she should have had it written down that even if she was pregnant she did not want to be on life support. Would the husband still have had to sue? Yes but at least it would have been clear to the judge what her true wishes were. Some will say she shouldn’t have had to do that but this is one of those things that you need to be VERY clear about.</p>
<p>The mother went for an hour, without oxygen.
How can they not think the baby was not damaged</p>
<p>I don’t think that is known. I think what was said was, she may have been w/o oxygen for an hour. The husband found her on the floor. No one knows how long.</p>
<p>Certainly I hope this baby isn’t born disabled in anyway. If it is born healthy, it will likely be because it was so tiny at the time, that a constant supply of oxygen wasn’t really needed. I don’t know enough about what a fetus needs at that point, but it may not be much. The fact is…if the mom wasn’t breathing for an hour, and the baby didn’t die, then that suggests to me that fetuses at that stage don’t need much oxygen.</p>
<p>There is no way to really know what the woman wanted. Yes she most likely really did tell her husband that she wouldn’t want to be on life support. But in her line of work she should have known the law in the state of Texas and she should have had it written down that even if she was pregnant she did not want to be on life support. Would the husband still have had to sue? Yes but at least it would have been clear to the judge what her true wishes were</p>
<p>Right…but some here really just want a dead fetus.</p>
That’s not really fair, any more than it would be fair for others to say that what you really want is for the state to control this woman’s body. This is a difficult enough situation without claiming that others are being deceptive about their motives.</p>
<p>The mother did not have a written directive. No one knows what she would want for this situation, ie brain dead and pregnant. Doctors don’t know if the fetus is brain dead or not.
When there are gray areas, the balance should tip in favor of the fetus.</p>
I don’t agree when the fetus is at 14 weeks, the mother is dead, and the father of the fetus expresses his wishes and says that he knows what his wife’s wishes were. As far as I know, this isn’t one of those cases where other family members are fighting the father.</p>