The pregnant brain dead and the fetus: must we always try to wrest life from death?
This article deals with the ever more timely and often vexing topic of maintaining a brain-dead mother as an incubator for her developing offspring. It explores the issue by: (1) reviewing the history of the problem and the "state of the art" today, (2) examining the moral problem of using brain-dead persons as incubators for potential or actual others, (3) searching for moral differences between maternal death early or late in pregnancy, and (4) presenting a possible resolution in such tragic cases. It concludes that (1) a moral necessity to deliver viable infants from brain-dead mothers exists; (2) the farther from viability brain death occurs, the more maintaining the mother as an incubator resembles experimental therapy with its imperative for careful, informed consent; (3) experimental therapy not being morally necessary, its proceeding under these tragic circumstances should invoke community support for the next of kin in dealing with the immediate and long-term costs; (4) all ethical problems proceed in a context to which the moral actors must be sensitive and one that alters the conclusions made.
Department of Medicine, University of Illinois College of Medicine, Peoria 61656.
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Loewy
D001926:Brain Death; D002585:Cesarean Section; D004992:Ethics, Medical; D005260:Female; D005328:Fetal Viability; D006806:Human Rights; D006801:Humans; D007258:Informed Consent; D008020:Life Support Care; D033261:Maternal-Fetal Relations; D028681:Moral Obligations; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D011247:Pregnancy; D011248:Pregnancy Complications; D037841:Pregnant People; D018570:Risk Assessment; D018454:Spouses; D009927:Tissue and Organ Procurement