Erick Munoz has sued the hospital that is using his dead wife's body as an incubator.
The first sentence of the article is factually incorrect. The woman is dead (with no brain stem activity) not in a coma or a vegetative state, so she is not being kept alive by the machines. The machines are supplying oxygen that cause her lungs to move up and down, but they are not keeping her alive.
At the time her husband found her, she had already turned blue. When she reached the hospital, the doctors ran tests and declared her brain dead, telling her father that she'd been dead for more than an hour. But they wouldn't take her off the ventilator because she was about three months pregnant and, with the machines on, both the mother and the fetus had heartbeats.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/family-pregnant-texas-woman-sues-hospital-keeping-life/story?id=21531385
The family of a pregnant woman who has been kept on life support against her family's wishes since November is suing the Texas hospital that is keeping her brain dead body alive.
Marlise Munoz, a 33-year-old paramedic, was 14 weeks pregnant when a suspected pulmonary embolism left her brain dead two months ago. But doctors at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth told her family a Texas law forbade them from withdrawing life support until the baby's birth or a miscarriage occurs.
"It's very frustrating, because we know what our daughter wanted, and we're not about to honor that because of this law," Lynne Machado, Munoz's mother, told ABCNews.com last month. "The grieving process as a whole for me and my husband and Erick [Munoz's husband] won't happen until she's off life support."
According to the motion filed in Tarrant County District Court on Tuesday, another state law may trump the law that forbids the hospital from withdrawing life support. The Texas Health and Safety Code defines death as the "irreversible cessation of the person's spontaneous respiratory and circulatory functions," the motion reads. Since Munoz has lost all brain stem activity, this law could apply to her, it says.
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