Woman declared legally dead is being kept alive due to state’s abortion laws

I mean upfront? If the family makes clear that the states’s decision to impose medical care on a dead body should not mean the family members are forced to pay those medical costs. It’s just seems odd they are incurring a debt that has nothing to do with them.

You're allowed an opinion.

However that said, are you anti abortion for yourself only or other women? It's fine for you to be for yourself, but not at all ok for you to dictate what other women need or want to do.

What’s horrific is if this results in a healthy child, if a dead body can carry a child to a healthy enough point, this is bad news for the rights of women and there will be people thinking they can use brain dead women as incubators. I could understand if she was heavily pregnant at the time but only 9 weeks…

Being declared brain dead means you are legally dead. In the U.K. we perform two sets of brain stem tests by senior clinicians and if a patient is found to not have these brain stem reflexes they are legally dead from the time the first test ended (the second is an extra safeguard). Sometimes when patients and their families give the gift of organ donation we have some time that we need to get to before that happens and keeping someone’s physiology normal during that time is really really difficult.

This story makes me shudder and it is deeply frightening. She was an autonomous human being, a woman with rights and dreams and wishes and now she has sadly died. Where is her dignity in this? Where is her right to be treated as a person who lived and now is dead? Her poor family, my heart goes out to them.

I am 100% pro-abortion and 100% supportive of a woman’s right to choose. This isn’t about abortion though, this is about treating a woman like a vessel for a child. The same as in the other horrific cases where this has happened and it is terrifying.

Would they be allowed to treat a convicted criminal the same way? Deny them medical care, then keep them alive to harvest their organs?

@Neetra30This is what really pisses me off when someone says that they are 100% against abortion and it just tells me that they don’t know what they are talking about and sit on their high horse as if they are just better people than all of those irresponsible women who skip off down to the abortion clinic willy nilly.
I have never been in the position of needing to have an abortion but I know people who have and it might shock the people who are fully against it to know that some women abort much wanted pregnancies but in their ignorant world they can’t think of any reason this would happen.

OMFG. I didn't realise that. It just gets worse and worse.

Utter bollocks.

That’s not what they’re doing though.

that child’s life cannot be saved. It will not, can not and is not forming properly in a dead woman’s body.

they aren’t battling to save any life. What they are doing is an unethical experiment to see what happens to a foetus in a body on life support.

new headline “doctors experiment on foetuses to see how maternal death affects development in utero”

it’s the kind of medical experiment Joseph Mengele would be doing if he had access to today’s medicine.

if it were successful, what’s the next step? Renting the bodies of brain dead women for surrogacy?

Nailed it.

(in response to ThejoyofNC - this was supposed to have a quote!)
Your post was directly under this post:

The laws are less "medical abortions are no longer acceptable" and more "any medical intervention that could knowingly lead to the death of a fetus is illegal". They were deliberately written to be both broad and blunt.

If a medical intervention can or will cause loss of pregnancy, that is an abortion.

Thankfully, it does look like the law has been updated in USA to reflect ectopic pregnancies specifically as an exception. There are a few cases in red states (like Texas) where doctors have been afraid to undertake treatment in case they are fined (more likely that they disagree the legal exception).

I guess where it gets fuzzy now are other conditions that require treatment that might cause loss of pregnancy (i.e. an abortion) but to save the mother’s life. That is not protected explicitly in law. So, you are not 100% against abortion, by definition - as your responses have proven, you have your own personal exceptions.

Abortion doesn’t make pro-choicers happy, by the way. It just means that sometimes, there are some events where an abortion might be less traumatic than the alternative.

They seize the family’s assets

She’s a registered nurse wouldn’t she be covered by a work place policy of some sort? Possibly being kept alive whilst legally brain dead for months isn’t covered? Incidentals, American insurance is a mystery to me, you pay but then your not covered for lots. Even if you are they try and wiggle out of it.

Hsnd the whole situation over to social services is a bit hard isn’t it? This is a tragedy and the family are stuck in some sort of limbo waiting to see what happens. The doctors don’t have the answers.

I do think the situation is nuanced arguably pulling the plug is not an abortion as removing treatment from the mother. The death of the fetus occurs but it’s not the objective ( paraphrased from the catholic times)

16 weeks, kept alive until 32ish weeks I think.
I don't know what the long term effects were obviously, but no complications at all at birth, follow up at a year showed no issues and baby developing as normal.

One of the potential issues in these cases, is that if brain death was caused by oxygen deprivation for mum, the baby may also have been deprived until resuscitated/put on life support etc, and baby may have the same sort of brain damage.

The risks are going to be different in every case, but it's certainly not unusual for the baby to the survive. Equally, not unusual for the baby to be too poorly as mum unstable or baby injured with mum.

I recently had an abortion due to having a stage 3 bladder prolapse, where another pregnancy would have left me incontinent and would have severely depleted the quality of my life and the ability to provide and care for my existing children.
I also had the abortion because I literally could not have another due to having no space income as I live in overcrowded housing with no means to move.
What would you say to someone like me? That I should have kept it even if it my health had been severely impacted and my family being poorer?

And others are allowed to point out the logical conclusion of your opinions. Opinions aren't just random things that float around detached from real life.

Exactly they literally killed her to keep the baby alive because if the baby had died due to them treating her condition they would have broken the law

Do your research - termination of ectopic pregnancy is still not allowed or delayed until women are in extreme pain, tubes have burst or gone septic.

Also love that you’d still off 2 out of 3.

Not anybody’s tax dollars if they’re making the family pay.

I loved my children from the moment I found out I was pregnant with them, and I wouldn’t think they were undeserving of life if they were disabled or if I was dead. Not your body, not your life, and if you’re in the UK, not your tax dollars, either.

I can see both sides of this … and don’t feel that it’s fully an “abortion” issue.

The family is speaking to press, raising money, ok.

Where’s the baby’s father’s voice?

The mums medical issue is tragic, turning off life support is never easy for families … many families would want that baby and fight for it. This family doesn’t want it. The mother doesn’t have capacity, but is currently alive.

Family probably not have to pay the bills for an adult, the daughter can become a non-payer, no problem. Hospitals get this all the time. … guessing she had no insurance? No Medicare?

The baby can be adopted - disabled or not. Not sure the family is correct to say that they have to pay $$$$$ and get a disabled child to support. They can hand it right over to children services. Hand whole situation over to social services.

No it isn’t possible.

the woman is dead. Her body is not functioning. She will need medication to keep her heart rate stable, to keep her blood pressure stable. Medication to keep her kidneys functioning. She’s in ITU with clinicians having to monitor her constantly to stop her body dying. Her brain will not be producing the correct hormones to support a child. 9 weeks is still forming key organs and development.

i think the earliest survival was a mother who died at 16 weeks. The survival rate of a foetus following maternal death and life support at 22 weeks is 1%.

a 9 week foetus will not survive that long inside a breathing corpse.

I am interested to know if they will start forcing pregnant Jehovah’s witnesses to have blood transfusions and other interventions to keep the mother alive.

So if she owns a house with her partner (for example) then he’d have to sell in order to pay her share in medical bills.

Savings, investments, pension the stuff that could go to support her existing child. Losing a parent / partner is a hugely traumatic experience I think it’s compounded by financial stress though.

I do wonder if since her mother ok’d the original surgery if that somehow puts her on the hook for the bill.