A US judge has ordered a Texas hospital to stop giving life support to a brain dead woman who had collapsed after a lung embolism. Not only does she meet all the clinical criteria for brain death but even her husband wants it that way — but there’s a catch: she’s 22 weeks pregnant. And a state law prohibits doctors from withdrawing life support from a pregnant woman. So how could a judge pass such an order?
Because there’s another catch: the foetus has become severely malformed ever since it was deprived of oxygen for about an hour when the mother lay comatose before being discovered by the husband. As a result doctors are now fairly certain that the foetus is no longer viable and would die on its own after birth, if not earlier. In that case should they not wait for that to happen before pulling the mother off the machine?
This is where the Catholic Church kicks in. It maintains that from the first moment of its existence, a foetus has all the rights of a person — including the right to life. However it does recognise as morally legitimate certain acts which indirectly result in the death of the foetus. In that case it seems the Church and court have conflicted with the latter being more in the wrong as it appears to have been swayed by the fact that the foetus wasn’t viable.
Is it then also morally legitimate to indirectly cause the death of a newborn who is not viable beyond, say, five minutes? How about five hours then? Or five years? It’s dicey enough to say that the moment a sperm and egg fuse it’s infused with Spirit, but downright illogical to wave the viability card.
(This piece first appeared in The Economic Times)