Does the mother or the baby take priority?

I have serious concerns about this. The pregnancy was still at the stage of not being viable! The woman appears to have had a serious thrombosis and herself suffered brain damage, presumably due to lack of oxygen. I find it hard to see how this could not have affected her foetus.

Would the trauma to the mother have also caused all sorts of stress hormone chemicals to flood into her and the foetus. These could cross the placenta and add to any damage. Not to mention the drugs etc that might be needed to keep the mother alive. How many more physical crises might this woman have on her life support in the next 5 months?

What I find interesting is who is paying the medical bill? How come a medical insurance company has agreed to take on such an incredibly expensive task, not to mention the possibility of funding care for a severely disabled child.

IMO It should not have gone ahead with such an early pregnancy. The same situation in the last few weeks of pregnancy would be very different. I feel they have gone way too far, some sense of dignity is needed.

Nellie, great post. You are so right about the trauma's this poor woman's body will have gone through, and may continue to go through and the potential impact on the baby of going short of oxygen. I hadn't thought of the medical costs, that a good point. It makes we wonder if some pro life organisation is funding it. Or is that too cynical.

I'm not indicating a blind pro abortion view by criticising the pro life organisations. The fact they feel it's ok to shoot doctors and terrify women going into clinics to make choices none of us would choose to have to make, makes it impossible for me to do anything other than be angry with them.

I was going to quote 'Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive:' but then I saw the full text of the poem it came from. It puts rather a different meaning to it.
www.bartleby.com/73/1805.html

For a country which prides itself on personal freedom, the US at least at State level, is curiously Old Testament in some areas.

It's Texan law that life support cannot be switched off when a woman is pregnant. I suppose the state must pay. However, it has now been reported by the family's attorney that the foetus's lower body is deformed , it has hydrocephalus and lack of oxygen has probably caused additional problems that cannot currently be diagnosed because of the mother's immobility.

Her father says that touching his daughter is like touching a mannequin and that's not how he wants to remember her.

This really doesn't seem right.