DUBLIN: Ireland’s high court ruled doctors can withdraw life support for a clinically dead pregnant woman yesterday, in the latest case to trigger heated debate on the country’s stringent abortion laws.
Despite requests from the woman’s family for her to be allowed to die, doctors continued life support as the Irish constitution says a woman and her unborn child have an equal right to life.
The woman was 14 weeks pregnant when she was declared clinically dead on December 3 after suffering a brain injury. She has been on life support since but is “deteriorating rapidly”, the court heard.
The case touched on a deeply divisive issue in Ireland, which has a controversial constitutional ban on abortion.
The high court’s judgement accepted medical evidence that the foetus has “no realistic prospect of emerging alive” and that only legal uncertainty had brought the case to this point.
“To maintain and continue the present somatic support for the mother would deprive her of dignity in death and subject her father, her partner and her young children to unimaginable distress,” the judgement said.
It described continuing medical treatment as “a futile exercise which commenced only because of fears held by medical specialists of potential legal consequences”.
AFP
