Court Order to Keep Brain-Dead Girl on Ventilator Is Extended
A court order was extended late Monday that will keep a 13-year-old girl deemed brain-dead on a ventilator for another week, while the facility pledged to work with the family to transfer Jahi McMath elsewhere if certain conditions could be met.
Sam Singer, a public relations consultant retained by the hospital, said the family must find an outside physician willing to insert breathing and feeding tubes, a way to transport Jahi and a nursing care facility that is willing to accept “a deceased person.”
The case has tugged at the hearts of people across the country who are sympathetic to the family’s pleas that Jahi be given a chance to “live.” Experts in law and medical ethics, meanwhile, say she is legally dead with no chance for a change in her condition.
“The hospital continues to give its deepest condolences to the family, and we hope they can come to terms with the death of Jahi McMath,” Singer said outside the hospital after a temporary restraining order initially issued by Alameda County Judge Evelio Grillo on Dec. 20 was extended through Jan. 7.
It had been set to expire at 5 p.m. Monday. The family attorney, who had sought the original restraining order and the extension, is appealing Grillo’s determination that Jahi is brain-dead and filed a separate case in federal court. Singer said hospital attorneys plan to fight all three.
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There has been broad consensus for decades that “irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brainstem” constitutes one of two legal definitions of death. (The other is “irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions.”) A Harvard Medical School committee first put forth the standard in 1968, and in 1981 a presidential council proposed a uniform statute to be adopted nationwide.
It was endorsed by the American Medical Assn., the American Bar Assn. and the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws, which published it as the “Uniform Determination of Death Act.” California has such a statute. Another presidential council that took up the issue in 2008 reaffirmed that “whole brain death” is legal death.
Although, in most cases, death comes when the heart and lungs stop working, in others — like Jahi’s — death comes with the cessation of all brain activity, but a ventilator can provide apparent signs of life.