Read also: wants to remove the life support
Marlise Munoz, 33, is currently confined at the intensive care unit of John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas and 19 weeks pregnant.
"We talked about it. We're both paramedics," Erick told WFAA. "We've seen things out in the field. We both knew that we both didn't want to be on life support."
The hospital's decision is based on a Texas law that prohibits them to follow a family directive when there is pregnancy involved.
According to the Killeen Daily Herald, Erick found his wife unconscious on November 26. Though the family was clueless of the exact cause, they were looking at the possibility of pulmonary embolism to explain the condition. Marlise Munoz was pregnant for 14 weeks that time.
The situation has placed Erick Munoz in a personal conflict with himself, as a father who wanted a second child now that their first child is 14 months old, and as a medical professional who didn't know the survival rate of the fetus or how much pain it had endured.
The case of Marlise Munoz seems to be rare. Based on an article published in the BMC Medicine journal in 2010, there were at least 30 cases of brain-dead pregnant women in more than approximately 30 years. From the 19 results that were reported, 12 of them showed that a viable child was born while 6 of them had post-birth date for a period of two years. The research also highlighted that all of the children developed normally.
J.R. Labbe, hospital spokeswoman, expressed that she is not allowed to confirm Marlise Munoz' brain-dead condition and would rather say that she was pregnant and had to stay in the hospital being under a serious condition.
"We are following the law of the state of Texas," Labbe told Killeen Daily Herald. This is not a difficult decision for us. We are following the law."
