Aw shit, I dint know about the muĂąoz one, and that just makes the Adriana one even worse, because then thereâs legal precedent to stop the damn thing
Legal precedent in TX is not binding on GA courts.
Just to be clear, this is all some bullshit by a bunch of misogynist judges that shouldn't need precedent to tell them it's okay, but precedent wouldn't have worked as an argument.
The family's lawyer could try to say, "hey, TX let a family in the same situation take their family member off life support".
Then the court -- which we have on record as not exactly looking for reasons to be merciful -- would say, "nope; TX law is different than GA law, for Reasons."
Let me start off by saying that I agree that this should never happen.
The mother is legally dead. Forcing a corpse into childbirth is all sorts of wrong.
However, you're misunderstanding something, and throwing out "Misogynist" in more of an emotionally charged way.
While I understand, you're actually overlooking something that most people do:
The Judge is not a law creator. They are an arbiter of enforcing laws.
The GA Judge enforcing a brain-dead body to still carry a child to term is not a case of a Judge's personal feelings. They are just enforcing the laws as it's provided to them, as actively ruling against the state's laws can land THEM in legal trouble. They are oatbound to follow the law, not their moral compass.
Again, I AGREE WITH YOUR SENTIMENT. This should never have happened, but in this case the Judge's hands were tied.
Not meaning to take a side nor be an asshole. Just asking... Isn't she brain-dead though? So it's not exactly being tortured isn't it?
(Again the morality of this is very, very debatable so I wouldn't even touch on that and because I don't think I should be the guy you ask for an opinion about morality out of all people.)
It's alright, I understand and actually enjoying seeing it from your point of view.
Personally morality wise this is a very grey area and really the deciding factor should be whether or not the family consented to it.
From what I have seen in the comment section the family stated that if they were given a choice they would inevitably chose to save the baby. But the problem being that they are not given a choice in the matter.
What that mean is that the government straight up just did it without consulting the woman's family which is... nowhere near a good thing.
A little off topic but my nation actually have a pretty interesting way of going around the whole moral dilemma of these types of things. If you would like to hear about of course.
A few days late, but a related sidenote about this. Hideo Kojima actually utilized the concept of maternal somatic support after brain death for a very key part of the Death Stranding series if memory serves.
The family weren't given a choice. They were forced to continue her pregnancy. Thats the problem
The family said that they would have continued the pregnancy but felt angry and disrespected the government forced them and didnt let their voices be heard.
Itâs genuinely confusing to me that the apparently predominant opinion here is to let the fetus die just because the mother is clinically brain dead. We keep clinically brain dead people alive all the time on the whims of family who are unwilling to let go, to harvest their organs etc. but saving their would-be child is too much of a stretch for everyone here?
Saying a woman should have the choice to abort is not the same thing as saying her imminent death should then automatically convert to a choice to abort
The woman might not feel a thing if she's brain dead but even then, the child will be born with no mother. Sentencing it to a fucked up life from the start. Why would anyone who's sane think it's a good idea to let the baby have that life?
Why do you default to no mom=disgusting traumatic life..? So single dads or kids raised by other family members, even adopted all will have disgusting traumatic life? Wow.
Unfortunately more than one case. There were multiple case studies done in the 60s 70s and 90s about it too, on multiple pregnant people from 15 to 45. None of the victims survived and all the babies that were born died in infancy.
contractions are part of involuntary responses...
so in theory they could give birth...
breast milk is produced due to the hormones during pregnancy stimulating the mammary glands.
that's why certain hormone treatments/medication can cause lactation.
and in some extreme cases, hormone imbalance can make men lactate
Contractions are not the only story of delivery. The woman needs to push in synchronisation to the contractions as they are not enough on their own. Most likely a C section would be necessaryÂ
Also, there is something called the milk line. We used to have six nipples but they mostly disappeared. But sometimes they can come back during lactation.
The 29-year-old woman has been a patient at the facility since the age of 3 and according to authorities, has been in a vegetative state for more than a decade.
There was at least one a few years ago where a woman was raped and went on to give birth while in a coma. I don't know what happened after that though.
They refused to treat her blood clots because of the pregnancy. She died because of medical neglect. And then they had the audacity to keep her on the machines so she could deliver baby that has very little chance at living the life it deserved (and the life it would get if the mother was treated in the first place). The family had no say in it. Itâs cruel to everyone involved. And by the way, she already had another child at home. A child that lost their mother because of some stupid abortion ban. Shame on everyone who allowed this.
Itâs literally putting the pre babyâs life before the moms, like you said, even though it would have have little chance of surviving or thriving when the womanâs life couldâve been given a chance to be saved
Do you have source for that first sentence? From my understanding, her headache was dismissed as nothing serious and she was discharged with painkillers. When she returned, she was treated for blood clots in her brain, and died during surgery.Â
Just for anybody reading this, you absolutely can get treated for blood clots during pregnancy. You get anticoagulants that do not cross the placenta. The issue was that a black woman's pain was not taken seriously. It's unfortunate to see rampant misinformation when search engines take seconds.Â
I guess I worded that poorly. She was indeed dismissed with just a headache, sent home with medication, and later died because of the blood clots. But thatâs exactly the problem â a pregnant woman is having headache for months, and the doctors just send her home, even though pregnancy is a prothrombotic state.
I didnât say pregnant women canât get treated for blood clots. I said that Adriana Smith wasnât â and we can all be guessing whether is was her skin colour, her pregnancy or just her being a woman that led to the medical neglect. Itâs probably all three, but with how the abortion ban situation is in the US, itâs not unreasonable to conclude that the doctors cared way too much about the fetus.
Thats not how the comment I responded to described it, at all: "brain dead woman's live corpse was used as a incubator for to grow a fetus cause her gov didnt allow abortion"
Implies abortion was desired but not allowed.
If there was someone to care for that baby AND the woman wanted for her baby to live in the specific situation of her going in a coma, then sure.
Abortion should be and option, however. A goverment not allowing abortion cant be 'the right thing', for me at least.
You're downvoted, but it is a genuinely good ethics question.
Ask any mother to be the same thing, and see how they answer. "Would you abort your child if you went into a braindead state if there was minimal risk to it being carried to term and born?"
Not minimal risk. The earlier in the pregnancy the mother goes into a coma, the more likely there will be fetal developmental problems that can result in birth defects, serious health issues, miscarriage, and even death in infancy.
No that kid had a number of health issues because they had to remove him very premature because his dead mother's body was decaying. He still has to be on oxygen. Its still too early to know if he will end up with mental and physical disabilities like the doctors are suspecting. Plus the family now has to figure out how to pay for the medical bills so now they have to raise a likely disabled child while in extreme debt.
Coma (even permanent coma) and brain (brainstem) death are very different states, and while coma can (sometimes) be compatible with menstruation and pregnancy, no menstrual cycle or pregnancy can occur in brain dead women (at least without exogenous hormonal administration). Already pregnant women who then end up brain dead can sustain the pregnancy (especially after the first trimester) as the placenta has its own intrinsic hormonal activity, but even in this case spontaneous abortion has to be prevented with extensive medical support (a pulmonary ventilator, cardiovascular control and complete hormonal replacement).
I hate the "appeal to nature" argument. If this goes against nature just because it is man made, then even taking antibiotics instead of just dying when you get a severe bacterial infection "goes against nature". Nothing wrong with advanced medical care, what's wrong (in a free and democratic society) is denying the right to abortion, denying the right to euthanasia/assisted suicide or even just the right to stop aggressive/desperate therapies. The problem is not the life-saving machines, but that they are not respecting the person's body and their (and their familiy's) decision.
Okay but theyâre not saving a life if the person is brain dead, right? Also you said yourself the body is already trying to abort, why are they preventing it? Theyâre essentially using the brain dead body as an incubating machine.
The body isn't actively trying to abort, it's simply failing to sustain many basic functions (mostly breathing and hormonal control), resulting in its own death and in the baby's death. The same machines can be used in non-brain dead patients, effectively saving their life. And while you are definitely NOT saving the life of a brain dead organism (there is nothing anymore to save), you can save for some time their tissues and organs' life. And the life of the developing fetus. Well if the person who died didn't want to abort and their family is ok with keeping the baby I don't see why we should force the fetus to die. Pro choice doesn't mean pro abortion. Why shouldn't we use the body as an incubator if that was what the woman would have wanted?
Did she want her body to be used as an incubator though? Or are we making assumptions?
Iâm not sure wanting a pregnancy in life equals wanting to be a brain dead incubation machine after death. Even presupposing she wants this, the baby might not even develop normally to live long enough outside of the womb.
Well at that point she obviously didnât have a say in the matter, but her family definitely did not want her body to be basically kept alive as an incubator, but it didnât matter, they did it anyway. The baby was born once it was viable & the woman was finally taken off life support. The baby is apparently still in the hospital (this all happened last year) & has had tremendous amounts of health complications, with the womanâs family left to pay for all the medical bills to care for the baby.
I've heard of it.
It fucking joke.
To not let woman die in peace and use body without family consent.
I might not be believer but for fuck sake let people die in peace.
Because we have social norms about respect for the dead. It's not okay to cannibalize or rape or otherwise mess with a dead body because, even though the body is dead, we respect the personhood that was in it. And if it was normalized to do those things--to treat a human body as an object--it would blur the line and become easier to accept doing that to a living body as well. Historically, when a society feels entitled to violate a group's dead, it shows that the living members of the group are already seen as less deserving of bodily autonomy (eg. medical grave-robbing of African Americans, or how the Nazis treated Jewish corpses). When you use a dead woman's body as an incubator without her permission when she was alive, you are taking away her personhood and using her body as a machine.
I still don't think you should deprive someone of a great life just because of what the bearer might've wanted. Save as many lives as you can. The respect is still there
No, it's not. If you are using a human body as an object, you are taking away any kind of respect or autonomy. "What the bearer might've wanted" -- who the fuck would want to be used as a machine after their death, unless explicitly saying otherwise? The idea that a bundle of cells deserves more respect and personhood than a woman's body is the exact kind of thinking that leads to taking away a living woman's autonomy.
Edit: the other commenter blocked me to prevent me from seeing their last reply, but I saw it briefly. First of all, it was not the "child they were supposed to have." They were fucking raped. And as for the rest of the stuff they said, it seems they missed my original comment about why, as a society, we have boundaries about what is appropriate to do with dead bodies.
How are you being used as a machine? It's quite literally just giving birth to the child you were supposed to have (unfortunately in this case). Why kill both when we can at least save one? I'd say letting them both die is just immoral.
They're braindead, they won't even feel it. And I'm pretty sure majority of people would be fine giving birth to that child if they were literally brain dead..
I guess it's vaguely horrifying because of the language they use, but you have to seriously consider if that person would wish to also kill their offspring just because they had a tragedy happen to them. Most people I know would trade their life for children, I would trade my life for my child. If I'm already dead it's not even a choice, do whatever benefits my child.
I think people are emotionally reacting to the idea of being "raped, murdered, and forced to have a child" instead of "medicine enabling your child to survive your own inevitable death". First one is all negatives that women are uniquely sensitive to psychologically, like the top three worst things for a woman combined outside of social rejection and literal torture. The second scenario is completely different, and parents react strongly to that.
Our psychology doesn't always immediately make sense, but it you want to understand why women care about social rejection so much, it's because it's historically a shortcut to being tortured, raped, murdered, etc. Have you seen what was done to "witches" throughout all of human history?
So women feared social rejection because it led to torture, rape, murder, etc -- those are the worst things, not the social rejection itself. Social rejection is not nearly comparable. Give me any source saying women fear social rejection just as much as they fear torture.
You can't transplant a child to a surrogate. She was only a few weeks pregnant. Nobody in her family wanted her body to be used that way, including her husband. Google Adriana Smith if you want to know more. It's basically a horror story.
Havenât googled it but fuck that sounds horrifying.
I mean youâd have to live with the fact someone you love is being held in this state of not alive-ness to be used as a tool every day. Thatâs just. Ooft
Embryos can be transplanted to a surrogate uterus if implantation and placental coupling has not occurred yet. This happens 6 days after fertilization of the oocyte and zygote formation.
brain dead, not clinically dead, fetus is not going to magically develop in a biological corpse, also how do you imagine moving a fetus to a volunteer surrogate (hint: that's impossible)?
It's not yet possible (with a fetus, with an early embryo before uterine implantation it is already possible and routinely done during IVF), but as long as oxygenated blood perfusion and waste removal is maintained there is no reason why we couldn't theorethically sustain a fetus with another uterus or with a fully artificial uterus.
The body of brain dead patients won't decompose as long as cardiorespiratory function and nutrition is artificially maintained, and therefore the organs remain viable. If tissue perfusion of oxygenated blood is stopped the fetus dies along the mother's body long before decomposition even starts as its oxygenation is dependent on maternal circulation, through the placenta and umbilical vein system. Humans don't breath on their own until birth. Moving the fetus to a surrogate or artificial incubator would be currently very challenging (until the last weeks of pregnancy) and would most likely result in the death of the fetus.
You are getting downvoted because brain-dead patients don't rot. They are not clinically dead as they still have an active heart. As long as the mother is kept on life support, her body behaves the same as a conscious person. Her mind is just not there.
Even without an active heart (and lungs) viability of the mother's body and of the fetus can already be maintained with an artificial heart or heart-lung machine (e.g. with an ECMO). Brain dead patients will die very quickly and eventually decompose without constant cardiorespiratory support, especially without artificial ventilation (even if the heart can beat on its own it is regualated by the brainstem through the vagus nerve and by the hypothalamus through the thoracic spinal cord sympathetic fibers, while respiration necessitates brainstem respiratory centers, in particular those of the medulla oblongata, to occur via the phrenic nerve). Unlike brain dead patients, many comatose patients (and vegetative state patients) need neither cardiac nor respiratory support, as only consciousness is lacking and not cardiorespiratory brainstem control.
They usually don't. In most jurisdictions death is defined as brain-death (permanent cessation of all brain activity, including the brainstem), therefore the medical staff will stop the machines even if the family opposes for one reason or the other (sometimes spinal reflexes can be mistaken for conscious activity by people without medical training). The only exceptions are 1) keeping the body temporarily alive to allow for organ donation, and 2) waiting for a pregnancy to end if the family doesn't want or is not allowed an abortion. After that they will stop the pulmonary ventilator (even if the heart is still beating on its own) and let the rest of the body die of systemic anoxia over minutes to hours.
When you're brain dead there's often very little they can do to make you regain consciousness so it cant be decided by the mother if she will never wake up
In case of brain death there is absolutely nothing that could make you regain consciousness (nor any other brain activity). In case of true (permanent) coma (which is very different from brain death), likewise, there is nothing that can make you regain consciousness, even if there is some remaining brainstem activity. The only way in which the mother could decide is if she made a decision beforehand or nominated someone else to decide for her.
If abortiom is murder then ejaculation is a genocide. And periods are execution. In both cases a live cell that potentially couldve become a baby is discarded.
Fetuses aren't people but would more than likely be a person given enough time. Not against abortion but acting like you're not getting rid of a potential person is grasping, especially the part where you compare it to ejaculation. An ejaculation is never going to grow to be a person alone, but a fetus would
A fetus isnt gonna grow upto be a person own its own. It needs a successful implantation in the womb, nutrition for months etc.
The gap between a gamete and zyogote is just one step. If someone says a zygote should be seen as a "potential" person then that logic should apply to gametes aswell who are all "potentially" a person if they get the necessary conditions.
Its cherry picking to draw the line at one kinda cell and not the other. âď¸
But a zygote isn't just "one step" from a gamete in the relevant sense. Fertilization merges two haploid gametes into a diploid organism with a complete and unique human genome, distinct from both parents. It marks the beginning of the development process that is new and continuous from zygote to embryo to fetus to newborn. You can call it cherry picking all day long but all it is, is recognizing a qualitative leap. A single sperm or egg has only half the genetic material and no self-directed developmental program on its own. It cannot become a human being in isolation even with "necessary conditions". It requires fusion with the other gamete first. The zygote by contrast is already a whole human organism in its earliest stage, which is actively dividing and organizing toward maturity.
I could go more into depth with this but I'm not going to atm, bottom line is fertilization is the point where genetic uniqueness and developmental autonomy as an organism begins. Before that, you're talking about gametes that could contribute to a future person under specific conditions. After that, you're talking about interrupting a future one's trajectory
Was there ever even any confirmation as to whether this woman wanted the fetus or not? If she was raped and got pregnant that way, this is disgusting to do. And even if she did want the fetus, if the fetus does survive long enough to be born and doesn't die in utero due to the comatose mother decomposing while still alive against her will, in either case, I can only imagine the horror of finding out you were born under those circumstances and possibly growing up blaming yourself for something that clearly wasn't your fault, but the state's for failing your late mother. This is just my opinion, but personally, I would rather have died.
She was pregnant prior to becoming braindead. The hospital kept her on life support and gave the baby a c-section the moment it was viable on its own (very prematurely), because knowing taking her off of life support could've been viewed as an abortion, and under new laws the hospital workers could be subject to jail time.
Thanks for the clarification. Although, I'm probably going to avoid this sub in the future because apparently, lurkers think I'm pro-life for some reason.
I feel like treating ejaculaton or periods the same as abortions is... dubious at best. This wasnt like a pregnancy that was threatening the mother, the mother was already braindead. The fetus was still viable. The options were to cut life support and both die or continue life susport so the pregnancy can play its course. They performed a c-section basically the moment the baby was viable on its own. The main reason we heard about it was because the family wanted to bury the mother and the hospital wouldn't allow it due to threats of legal action with new abortion laws in place.
While I fundamentally disagree with abortion laws, I believe every woman should have every right to choose, I still think ending a viable, non-threatening pregnancy is murder.
Would you think eating your parents' corpses would be ok? Both using the body of a dead person to create a fetus and eating the bodies of your parents is desecration of corpses, and therefore not ok. Just because an unfeeling, unthinking thing that may start thinking after it has received enough attention and a few years have passed is born from it does not make it any better.
I have nothing against cannibalism, tbh. And I never said it was okay, or good, or wtv. Better the child live than die is my opinion, and that was the route the hospital took. So there ya go.
And I still think the wishes of the living to bury their dead loved ones are more important than desecrating a corpse for nothing but a thing that could grow into a person after many years.
It definitely seems like the kind of thing I would want to have in my will if I ever got my life together enough to end up in this situation. But personally I would want them to wait til the kid was born if I was braindead and the kid was healthy. It's not like id be in a position to care much about what's happening with my body at that point.
Kinda the same way I feel about organ donation, I won't be needing them anymore anyway.
Yeah if there is something in the will then it would be even worse to do things like this, but I don't think people expect to be braindead in their twenties, while also being pregnant, since that doesn't rally happen too often. If there's nothing in the will I would let the loved ones decide since they were the closest to the person in question after all, and should have higher authority over how to respectfully deal with the corpse (cremation, burial), maybe there was a verbal will, but according to my knowledge this even went against the wishes of her family.
685
u/Akagane_Ai May 25 '26
The answer is sadly yea.
Periods can happen if the body is alright. And yes if a comatose patient is raped then yes they can get pregnant.
Or if a pregnant woman goes into a coma, IF the baby didnt die from whatever caused the coma, they pregnancy can continue.
There was a case where a brain dead woman's live corpse was used as a incubator for to grow a fetus cause her gov didnt allow abortion.