Keeping a body alive: women with fewer rights than the foetus.

[Iris65]

'Numerous states have adopted laws restricting the ability of doctors to end artificial life support for terminally ill pregnant patients. Twelve of those states (including Texas) have the most restrictive of such laws, which automatically invalidate a woman's advance directive if she is pregnant. Such laws state that, regardless of the progression of the pregnancy, a woman must remain on life-sustaining treatment until she gives birth.' From: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Marlise_Muñoz

This case makes me feel sick. A woman could be 8 weeks pregnant and her body kept alive as a biological incubator for the sake of a person who doesn't yet exist.

I understand that if a an infant is viable a caesarian section would be justified but keeping her body alive for months to allow the infant to reach viability is profoundly disrespectful of her rights as an individual.

Ah okay I read theWikipedia entry properly,

I'm confused - it was established that she did not need to be kept on life support to keep the baby alive and it was turned off? Because she was legally dead so the Texan law did not apply?

Or have I misread that.

No. She had already been declared brain dead when the hospital said that they couldn't disconnect the life support because she was pregnant. They cited a Texas law but the judge ruled the law only applied to women wha had not been declared legally dead before the application.
So if someone applies to have a woman's life support turned off but she has not been declared legally dead then by law the woman's body must be maintained until the end of the pregnancy.
This means that if a woman is terminally ill but is not brain dead then by law she can be subjected to heroic life sustaining measures such as intubation, dialysis, sedation, parenteral feeding.
I am not sure whether this means that she cannot refuse treatment even if she is conscious. When she is unconscious she will be subjected to all of the above and more.

No doubt that it would all be heavily romanticised "your mother achieved the pinnacle of feminine saintly-ness by sacrificing herself for her child, even beyond her own death blahblahblah..." So fucked up on so many levels.

Oh my god, I just realized I read a book once, where a disease had spread to everyone on earth, which meant pregnancy would kill any woman immediately,

A couple of scientists had unfrozen some egg cells and fertilized them with their own (all male scientists) sperm, and the resulting fetuses would not be infected with the disease.

Now, a woman could be kept alive during the first couple of pregnancy months if put into an artificial coma or something ...

The protagonist decided she wanted to volunteer for this scheme (they were looking for volunteers, calling them "Sleeping Beauties" and heavily idealizing the noble sacrifice), but her father, one of the scientists, was against it.

It was very creepy on so many levels, but so close to reality.

Will try to find out how it was called.

I think a once heard a bit of a R4 radio play like that Vestal, it sounds familiar.

I would say a lot of this aspect in modern America terrifies me. It's not just this extreme where an unborn group of cells has more rights than an adult woman - just have a look at abortion and even birth control rights in some places. It is fucked in beyond belief.

"If an expectant mother is aware she is dying and expresses a wish to be kept alive until the viability of her baby, that should be done if possible. But there should be no enforced preservation of life to allow growth of a foetus."
That's what I think too, lougle. If a woman has consented to being kept alive until her baby is delivered, then I definitely think her wishes should be carried out. If a woman has a more advanced pregnancy, and it can be reasonably expected that it is what she would have wanted then I think there is also a case for keeping her alive until the baby can be delivered, even though in that situation she couldn't have consented in advance because she didn't know she would be taken ill.
That's not what happened in the link though. In fact what the US judgement means is that a woman and her family wont even necessarily know she is pregnant, until she is hospitalised. Could it mean, therefore, that doctors must legally check for pregnancy before turning off the life support of any woman/girl of childbearing age? Should they be legally compelled to check for pregnancy before making the decision to stop CPR? Must a woman always be kept alive until any foetus (of any stage of development) has died/become unviable?
The case in Ireland is less shocking, because it seems like the situation arose due to uncertainty on the part of the doctors who were not sure how to interpret the rules. When these rules were written, I doubt anyone could have foreseen that exact situation occurring and the high court's decision ended that uncertainty.

Situations like the one in the op will be very, very rare, but that doesn't make them any less creepy, nor does it mean that there aren't wider implications for what that kind of legal judgement means.

Ah, found it on TV Tropes:

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheTestamentOfJessieLamb

Gruesome.

And again it proves that there's nothing in fiction more horrible than something real life people would actually do.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b02zc016
It does annoy me when the programmes I want aren't available on demand!

It's not just this extreme where an unborn group of cells has more rights than an adult woman - just have a look at abortion and even birth control rights in some places. It is fucked in beyond belief.

Indeed.
Though the unborn group of cells isn't really the entity with the rights over the woman's body, it is the men around her.
The (potential) baby is an afterthought.

This blogger has a theory that the hatred of children is as widespread in patriarchy as the hatred of women:
francoistremblay.wordpress.com/2012/11/30/pedogyny-the-hatred-of-children/
(He was also a bit confused about which part of "misogyny" means hate; but has corrected that everywhere but in the site name in the meantime)

I must say (although some of his views are pretty weird) he has a point there.
The people who make misogynist laws around contraception and abortion do not really think of the children. Children don't profit from being born to parents who don't want them. They also don't profit from being born to teenage mothers, or from having twenty siblings because their parents can't use contraception.

Being more generous, I think that some of the people who hold those opinions are not so much motivated by hate but by an "ideal world" morality, and by a severe lack of joined up thinking.

Being more generous, I think that some of the people who hold those opinions are not so much motivated by hate but by an "ideal world" morality, and by a severe lack of joined up thinking.

Possibly. But I don't think those people are the spearhead of the anti-choice movement.

There must be a lot of people who are quite well aware what their goal is (controlling women) and how they are going to achieve it (taking away women's rights and teaching society that women are to be treated as walking wombs).

The well-meaning, naive woman who just doesn't like the thought of "killing babies" wouldn't, if left to her own devices, think about the matter much, would she? The idea of it being possible to have an abortion would likely not even appear on her radar. Much less would such a person think about rare situations where a pregnant woman is in a coma, and want to make a law about it.

A person with such a severe lack of joined up thinking would probably walk through life blissfully unaware of other women getting pregnant unwanted and having abortions.
If she was told that someone in her family is going to have an abortion because the fetus has no brain, such a person would probably emphatize, and still remain firmly convinced that that's the only reason why someone would have an abortion.

There needs to be a hard core of misogynists, who then recruit naive people to their cause by forcing them to think about it, and urging them to "think of the children".