Sadly, in the end, there was no one there for the child. At the hearing everyone there wanted the baby dead. There was no attorney ad litum. The judge only heard from people who had wanted the mother pulled off life support-again no one spoke for the baby.
The sad part is how quickly the language of abortion apologists entered the debate. we heard again and again about “choice” .And the dehumanization of both the mother and child was frightening. The mother went form being brain dead to a rotting corpse. The child was described as having no head, no limbs, no sex organs. Of course nobody knows because nobody spoke for the child. But in the end everyone could “feel good” about the end result. After all could possibly oppose turning the ventilator off on a "corpse’ and a “fetus” with no head, no limbs and no gender.
The culture of death is so firmly ingrained in our culture that even pro-life Catholics espouse it tenants and don’t even realize it.
The hospital actually should have applied for a guardian ad litum for the baby the moment they decided the Mr. Munoz was not permitted to make any decisions on behalf of his child. Mr. Munoz was the father, yet was not permitted to make decisions.
The description of the baby is troubling, yes. But baby possibly became that way because of severe lack of oxygen that has always been fatal.
Marlise was brain dead because her heart stopped. Her husband says that she was blue when he found her.
She was pregnant. But, I am not a doctor, but I was able to find sources that give the protocol of what to do when mother has cardiac arrest (a stopped heart) babies over 20 weeks need to be born within 5 minutes. After 15 minutes prognosis for baby is very poor.
Why did the ER not know this protocol? How can they possibly try to revive dead person by claiming they want to help the baby without any case history at all? How moral is it to conduct an experiment on a human?
Again, I am not a doctor. But from personal experience, it is actually possible to test
if the womb had suffered a lack of oxygen. That could be done by sonogram or by MRI.
Did they do this?
This scenario and the discussion of the scenario has been extremely testing on me. I am pro-life, I obey the Church, I believe that life begins at conception. Look up anything that I have written about life issues on these boards for the past 10 or so years.
The issue here, with Mrs. Munoz and her child was not about abortion.
The issue had to do with ordinary care and extraordinary care of a human (baby Munoz).
In some scenarios it could have been ordinary care (baby was closer to term, treatment would be short with a relatively predictable outcome, baby would not suffer disproportionately) then I would see it as being ordinary care.
In the scenario of Mrs. Munoz, there have been just a handful of babies who were able to be saved after the death of his/her mother by maintaining life support. Most were older, and the treatment was shorter. We don’t know why those mothers suffered brain death.
Mrs. Munoz was 14 weeks pregnant. A full term pregnancy is 40 weeks.
Mrs. Munoz suffered fatal oxygen loss. Baby faced the same amount of oxygen loss. Baby had injuries that could have been caused by the sever lack of oxygen.
These factors lead me to believe that baby was receiving, extraordinary, experimental and futile treatment.
And the Church teaches that extraordinary care is not necessary.
