Abstract
Decision-making for pregnant women or fetuses who suffer brain injury is emotionally difficult and conceptually challenging. When both the pregnant woman and the fetus have suffered an injury with a poor neurological prognosis, and decisions about one of them will have implications for the other—decision-making is even more difficult. Decision-making standards and principles are reviewed for both pregnant women and for fetuses, using a real case from the author’s institution. Practical suggestions are made regarding deliberative processes and consultative models that can help with these difficult cases.
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Notes
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People from some religious traditions do in fact claim that a just-fertilized egg has the same interests as a newborn baby, and that destroying a just-fertilized egg would violate the same norms that are violated if one were to kill a healthy newborn. Holding such a viewpoint would dramatically alter the ethical analysis involving life-sustaining therapies for pregnant women. Analysis of cases from this viewpoint, and analysis of the full ethical implications of such a viewpoint, are beyond the scope of this chapter.
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Cochrane, T.I. (2019). Ethical Decisions in Pregnancy. In: O’Neal, M. (eds) Neurology and Psychiatry of Women. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04245-5_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04245-5_21
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