NPR: 'Macabre,' 'Strange' To Try to Save 'Fetus' in Texas Case; Likens Baby to Organ

Newsbusters.com ^ | January 28, 2014 | Matthew Balan

[Kaslin]

Wade Goodwyn, who hyped Wendy Davis's pro-abortion filibuster as a "ray of light" for Texas Democrats, slanted toward the left in a Tuesday item on NPR.org about the controversy surrounding Marlise Munoz and her unborn baby. Goodwyn asserted that the hospital, which sought to keep Munoz on life support until the baby could be born, was in the wrong: "The hospital's defense of its conduct was a tortured interpretation of the Texas Advance Directives Act."

The journalist, who once worked as a left-wing community organizer, also likened the baby, who was injured when Munoz suffered her life-ending malady, to a mere body part:

...Marlise was dead by Thanksgiving. There was no activity at all in her brain or brain stem. It seemed too macabre to be true, like something out of the book Coma, keeping dead bodies "alive" to harvest their organs....

Goodwyn/NPR hinted at their bias in the very title of the article: "The Strange Case Of Marlise Munoz And John Peter Smith Hospital." The writer hinted at his sympathy for Munoz's husband as he outlined the circumstances of the case in the first few paragraphs:

It would have been hard to find a happier man than Erick Munoz on that Tuesday morning before Thanksgiving....So it must have been with a feeling of disbelief and horror that Munoz knelt across the nearly lifeless body of his wife, Marlise, on the kitchen floor at 2 a.m., his fingers linking across her heart, arms pumping away in vain....

What little life she clung to would soon slip away. On Thanksgiving Day, doctors told her husband what he already knew: His 33-year-old wife was gone. A blood clot in her lungs had killed her, perhaps. They weren't completely sure.

Doctors informed Munoz and Marlise's parents...that the hospital wasn't going to disconnect Marlise from the ventilator. Texas law prohibited it because she pregnant....Munoz and his wife's parents told the hospital that Marlise, herself a veteran paramedic, had made it clear to everyone she didn't want to be kept alive by machines under any circumstances. The doctors and the hospital explained it didn't matter what Marlise or her husband or anyone else wanted — their hands were tied. She would stay on the ventilator until her 14-week-old fetus was delivered or died.

What little life she clung to would soon slip away. On Thanksgiving Day, doctors told her husband what he already knew: His 33-year-old wife was gone. A blood clot in her lungs had killed her, perhaps. They weren't completely sure.

Doctors informed Munoz and Marlise's parents...that the hospital wasn't going to disconnect Marlise from the ventilator. Texas law prohibited it because she is pregnant....Munoz and his wife's parents told the hospital that Marlise, herself a veteran paramedic, had made it clear to everyone she didn't want to be kept alive by machines under any circumstances. The doctors and the hospital explained it didn't matter what Marlise or her husband or anyone else wanted — their hands were tied. She would stay on the ventilator until her 14-week-old fetus was delivered or died.

Goodwyn then dropped his "macabre" label of the situation and his likening of the baby to an organ. He continued by underlining that "reporters began looking into this Texas Advance Directives Act, and interviewing its authors. And the authors told reporters they never meant for their law to be used to keep a pregnant dead woman 'alive' until the hospital could deliver the baby. They said if that's what John Peter Smith Hospital was doing, the hospital was misreading the law."

Near the end of the article, the NPR journalist made it clear that he was targeting the hospital for daring to let the unborn baby live, even if it was just hours or days:

.When the case got to court last Friday it quickly fell apart for the hospital. Its lawyers conceded in their filing that Munoz had been brain dead since Thanksgiving. The hospital also agreed her fetus wasn't viable, like it's mother it had been deprived of oxygen for at least an hour.

The hospital's defense of its conduct was a tortured interpretation of the Texas Advance Directives Act. "If the legislature intended for life sustaining treatment to be withdrawn, allowing the unborn child to die, it could have expressed this intent by adding a second sentence to section 166.049 to the effect that, upon the mother's death, the healthcare providers must withdraw life sustaining treatment and let the unborn child die," the legal response from the hospital said. "It did not so provide."

And so John Peter Smith Hospital maintained a corpse against the wishes of the family, for the protection of a fetus that couldn't live.

As anti-abortion and pro-Munoz protesters demonstrated outside the courtroom, State District Judge R.H. Wallace's ruling was direct and brief. "Mrs. Munoz is dead," he wrote. "Defendants are ordered to pronounce Mrs. Munoz dead and remove the ventilator and all other 'life-sustaining' treatment from the body."

As Wallace's verdict was read, Erick Munoz wept into his hands as his mother-in-law held him in her arms and cried.

Back in September 2011, Goodwyn aided pro-abortion activists in their campaign at the time against Texas Governor Rick Perry for trimming state funding of "women's health clinics." The reporter didn't give an ideological label for the activists, vaguely labeling them "family planning advocates," and spotlighted their objection that some of the cut funds were now going to crisis pregnancy centers.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Wade looks like an overgrown organ himself.

Very overgrown.

[stanne]

The 2,000 year old Catholic Church, in its Catechism, states that once a person is conceived, it is a person, equal to his or her mother and/or father.

It utilizes two pages for its entire treatise on abortion, which elaborates slightly on this statement/truth

The more these guys try to argue against the truth, the more evil they become

Period

[informavoracious]

Let’s pretend the woman was the surrogate mother for a gay couple who planned to adopt the baby. The left would be knocking itself out to keep her alive to birth that baby.

[GeronL]

leftists are insane

[MHGinTN]

We have had a disgusting spectacle here at FR over this episode. More than one or two ‘freepers’ were so anxious for the alive unborn child to be terminated. Was the child terribly deformed? They didn’t know, but they could not deny that the child continued to gestate (read grow) for the eight weeks following the mother’s collapse. And the lies (like the mother was without oxygen for more than an hour, which no one can know that unless they were involved in her demise) which flowed so freely regarding the mother’s condition (she was a rotting corpse? I don’t think so) and the information regarding the alive unborn child, well the lies were astonishing in their acceptance here at a pro-life site!

[yarddog]

I try not to use too much hyperbole but these people are truly beyond ordinary evil.

They are as evil as vampires if vampires existed.

[Valpal1]

The hospital also agreed her fetus wasn't viable, like it's mother it had been deprived of oxygen for at least an hour.

If the baby wasn't viable, then the right thing was done and no amount of RTL foot-stamping will change that. They need to pick better hills to die on.

[CaspersGh0sts]

What a backwards and heartless buffoon... It’s sad, really.

[exDemMom]

What a shame that judge did not do the right thing and point out that the life support was for the benefit of the baby, and that life support could not be removed until such time as the baby no longer needed it. From all accounts, that time was only a week or so away.

That “father” was awfully desperate to kill this kid. This whole situation is highly suspicious, IMO.

[onedoug]

Very like.

[angryoldfatman]

Valpal1 wrote: If the baby wasn’t viable, then the right thing was done and no amount of RTL foot-stamping will change that. They need to pick better hills to die on.

---

No 14-22 week old fetus is viable. I wasn’t at that age and you weren’t either.

There is no evidence that the unborn child had any deformity; only the proclamations of the husband and the divorce lawyers he hired stated such. In fact, the previous claim that the baby was so deformed that they could not determine the sex of it (her) was refuted by the father himself here:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/brain-dead-pregnant-womans-husband-names-fetus-22257902

Needless to say, poster Morgana’s prediction came true about the cremation of the bodies. Nice and neat, no subsequent exhumations to prove any foul play or wrongdoing.

[RobbyS]

This would never have happened in the days before Roe. For one thing, the matter would have been left to the judgment of the family. That decision, like the decisions of church and state, created a legal mess, where law trumps common sense.

[formosa]

Folks on the left seem to enjoy the the suffering and death of humans big and small. Gotta get control of that population bomb so they can save the earth from globull warming. Sick they are.

[RobbyS]

IAC, I doubt that the child could have thrived in such a toxic environment. As for viability, that is a pernicious concept.

[Intolerant in NJ]

Organs do not have a DNA makeup entirely unique and different from that of their host - listening to NPR is damaging to your IQ....

[RginTN]

There’s prolly alot of leftists posting here and they are revealed on threads about pro-life issues.

[MacMattico]

If the baby had been deprived of oxygen for more than an hour, why was the family and hospital saying earlier that the child was developing, just not “normally”? The child would have been dead and not developing at all! That seems fishy to me how the story changed. Also, when they stressed how the mom was dead, well then she isn’t using that body anymore, why not let the baby until it could be born?

The husband may be perfectly right that his wife didn’t want to be on life support. But I doubt the conversation went beyond that to “but what if you were pregnant and our baby could live”?

[angryoldfatman]

RobbyS wrote: IAC, I doubt that the child could have thrived in such a toxic environment. As for viability, that is a pernicious concept.

---

Your doubts are not medically founded. There was no toxic environment.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3002294/

Please clarify what you mean by “pernicious concept”.

I merely stated accepted medical fact, which is that an unborn child is not viable until at least the 24th week of gestation, and that is the limit of our technology.

This concept of viability is used as an excuse by pro-aborts to declare them somehow less than human and thus OK to kill.

The hospital was technically correct that the unborn baby was not viable; that’s why the brain-dead mother was on life support - to allow the child to gestate to the point of viability.

Nobody else except the lawyers and father (and to some extent the family, though they were under the influence of the father or lawyers) stated that the child was unable to live outside the womb once she had grown sufficiently, which she was on her way to doing.

[MHGinTN]

When a child is born without complications it is assumed that child has had 40 weeks of gestation. When an as yet unborn alive child is said to be 23 weeks there are two weeks either way, plus or minus, so that little one in Texas might have been 21 to 25 weeks of age, building the spacesuit he or she would use in the air world.

I am very suspicious when I read phrasing like 'toxic environment or rotting corpse. Such terminology shouts agenda, and an agenda which would have been squelched at FR not too long ago.