On Friday, the Dublin High Court ruled that it was lawful for the life-support to be cut off from a pregnant woman. The woman, who was in her late 20’s, had suffered brain death on December 3, four days after she suffered a serious fall. She was carrying an 15-week-old fetus at the time of her accident. The woman and her family remain anonymous.
The panel of three judges made their decision after seven doctors claimed that the fetus had no chance of survival due to the harmful environment of the mother’s body. The Irishwoman was kept alive for weeks through several machines that regulated and performed all of her bodily functions.
Her family, her husband and two children, wanted her to have a natural death, but due to Ireland's strict laws against abortion, the doctors kept her alive. The uncertainty of the legal aspect of the situation encouraged the doctors to sustain the fetus by keeping the mother alive.
In Ireland, the Eighth Amendment gives the mother and the fetus the same rights. This amendment has been under much debate, but Justice Nicholas Kearns, President of the High Court, stated that this case was not necessarily one of abortion.
“The entire medical evidence in this case goes one way only, and that is to establish that the prospects for a successful delivery of a live baby in this case are virtually nonexistent,” Justice Kearns ruled on Friday.
One of the High Court judges commented on the life-support of the mother, claiming it had a harmful effect on the mother’s family.
“It would subject her father, her partner and her young children to unimaginable distress in a futile exercise which commenced only because of fears held by treating medical specialists of potential legal consequences,” said the judge.
