Kendall Coffey on the Rights of Life

Flickr CC via Mercy Health

Kendall Coffey discussed a case in Texas with Steve Malzberg last week.  There is a law in Texas that is keeping a woman on life support because she is 14 weeks pregnant. Here is Kendall Coffey's commentary on the case:

The family is frustrated with the law, and they’re considering whether to in affect file a court challenge.  The essence of the court challenge would be that she has this tragically impaired woman has some right of privacy to determine her own death with dignity.  What I haven’t developed in the law, and certainly, other people who are not carrying a human life inside them, no question can provide living wills that specify under certain conditions.  Such as when someone’s brain does not seem to have maintained cognitive ability, they have a constitutional right to terminate their life. 

This situation, though I haven’t seen a court that says she has the right to end her own life if it eliminates the life of an unborn child.  That is the decision that has to be accepted.  Nor do I know, and haven’t been able to find the details whether she still wanted her own life terminated if she were pregnant. Surely this is not a situation that they would have anticipated at the time that the directive was given, but I would suggest that from a constitutional standpoint, that she is being described as virtually brain dead, it seems to be that there has to be a greater respect for the life of the unborn child, where her own life is irretrievably damaged.

This is not the normal situation of a Roe v. Wade where you have a healthy vibrant person who is in full possession of their power and chooses to invoke a decision of their constitutional right to privacy.  This is someone who is no longer capable of making any decision at all.  So in that situation, do you override the laws of Texas, which says that if there is an ability to keep an unborn fetus alive to maturity then that is what the law requires?  It’s very different than some the cases we’ve been talking about.

I think it’s a fundamentally different question if the woman is pregnant, and I don’t know if there is any evidence that she said she would want to be taken off of life support even with an unborn child.  There’s a lot of discussion between balancing the rights of a woman and the later months in pregnancy.  It’s a much more difficult question when the only life that is able to be saved is that of the child.