Irish court orders pregnant woman taken off life support

Doctors removed life support from a brain-dead pregnant woman in Ireland after an emergency ruling by Dublin’s High Court last week.

The woman, a 26-year-old mother of two other children, died on Dec. 3 following a traumatic brain injury. She was 15 weeks pregnant at the time. A Dublin-area hospital refused her family’s requests to remove her from life support, saying the hospital could be legally liable for the death of the unborn child. Irish law gives unborn babies a constitutional right to life.

The court ruled the day after Christmas that there was no “genuine prospect” of the unborn child being born alive. Due to infections in the mother’s body and the two months remaining until the child could be delivered, the court concluded the life support was a “distressing exercise in futility for the unborn child,” and that doctors could legally comply with the family’s request to remove life support.

The court heard testimony and legal arguments on behalf of the woman as well as her unborn child, considered a citizen under Irish law. The court dismissed the argument that the woman’s right to “death with dignity” was grounds for stopping all life-supporting care. The judges also reaffirmed the rights of the child over the rights of the dead woman: “When a mother who died is bearing an unborn child at the time of her death, the rights of the child, who is living … must prevail over the feelings of grief and respect for a mother who is no longer living.”

The court said its decision to allow doctors to end life support, and thereby allow the baby to die, was based on the testimony of doctors that the baby had no chance of living.

Doctors testified that the woman’s body was quickly deteriorating—with high temperature and blood pressure, multiple infections, a swollen abdomen, likely pneumonia, and fluid build-up in her skull—and was a danger to the unborn child. In order to control the infections, medical staff were using drugs not considered safe for pregnancy. All seven doctors who testified said they believed the unborn baby would die before it was viable outside the mother’s womb.

But counsel for the unborn baby pointed to a study from Germany reporting outcomes of brain death in 30 pregnant women. Seven cases in the report involved women who died before 17 weeks gestation. Of those, two babies were successfully delivered and survived more than 30 days. They argued taking the mother off life support before the child is either born or dies in the womb denies the child a right to life and should be considered an illegal abortion under Irish law.

The court disagreed, ruling that there was no medical or ethical reason to continue life support: “The condition of the mother is failing at such a rate and to such a degree that it will not be possible for the pregnancy to progress much further or to a point where any form of live birth will be possible.” If the facts were different and the baby had a reasonable chance of living, even with abnormalities, the court said the case would be handled differently.

In a recent case in Alaska, doctors delivered a healthy baby 23 weeks after her mother was declared brain dead. Jessie Ayagalria was 12 weeks pregnant when she suffered a seizure. At the request of her family, doctors kept her on life support until the baby could survive outside the womb.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.