At 33, Marlise Munoz is brain dead and 20 weeks pregnant. But her pregnancy continues because Texas prohibits stopping life-sustaining treatment on a pregnant patient.
Her name is Marlise Munoz, and her case divides the United States of America. Victim on November 26 of a probable pulmonary embolism, this young woman of 33 years and now in a state of brain death, as revealed The world in its columns. But where things get even more complicated in this drama is that Marlise was pregnant at the time of her accident, which occurred after 16 weeks of pregnancy. And in such a case, Texas law is final.
Texas law: life support for pregnant women
A law of State of Texas dating from 1999 and signed by the governor and future American president George W. Bush indeed establishes that “no one can stop or suspend a life-sustaining treatment on a pregnant patient. “For this reason, the spokesperson for the establishment JR Labbe confides:” It is not a difficult decision for us, we are only following the law. In this case, the hospital will therefore keep the young woman alive until she can deliver her by cesarean section, when the fetus will be 24 to 28 weeks old. This childbirth scheduled for February will take place against the advice of Erick, Marlise’s husband. For the latter, his wife would not have liked therapeutic relentlessness. On CNN, he recently said, “After the brutal death of her brother four years earlier, my wife had made it clear that she would never want to be a relentlessly therapeutic patient in her life. We talked about it, ”he insists.
A fetus with sequelae
Especially since in this case, those close to Marlise fear that the future baby will have consequences. For the father, also interviewed on the American channel, “this poor fetus had the same lack of oxygen, the same electric shocks, the same chemicals used to make his heart beat again. According to doctors, he is in the same condition as his mother. Like the other members of the family, Ernest Machado therefore wishes his daughter to die peacefully with her fetus.
The Leonetti end-of-life law says nothing
French doctors are also regularly confronted with this kind of dilemma. Except that the Leonetti law of 2005 on the end of life says nothing about the case of these pregnant women in a state of brain death. As doctors confronted with these situations have told us, these patients are still the subject of intense debates between the medical teams and the relatives of the victim. According to these practitioners, in these cases it is necessary to look at the environment of the deceased woman, and above all to collect the wishes of the father or those very close to them, since they are the ones who will have to take care of the child.
Another major concern in such circumstances is the condition of the fetus. But, when the family wishes to prolong the pregnancy and the fetus is viable, practitioners will usually try to save the unborn child. He must nevertheless be at least twenty-four weeks old, the limit of extreme prematurity.
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