Sanity returns to Texas (for a day anyway)
by digby
It would appear that barring some last minute intervention by the anti-abortion zealots the tragic saga of Marlise Muñoz is finally over:
A federal judge ordered Friday night that Marlise Muñoz, the Texas woman who has been kept on life support against her and her family’s will, be removed from her ventilator and respirator.
Muñoz has been legally dead since she collapsed on her kitchen floor in November, but the state has kept her on a ventilator because she was pregnant. Lawyers for the John Peter Smith Hospital, where Muñoz is being kept, cited an obscure state law that stipulates that hospitals are required not to remove “life-sustaining treatment” from pregnant women to argue that such life support was necessary.
However, lawyers both for Muñoz’s family and for John Peter Smith Hospital acknowledged Friday that the fetus was “non-viable.” Earlier, attorneys simply had indicated that the fetus suffered “abnormalities,” but did not say whether it could viably live outside of the womb.
I’ve been writing about this for a while and I’ve been struck by how little air time the Fox News claque has been giving it. Can it be that it was too ghoulish even for them?
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