Defining death: When parents won’t let go

“Is 13-year-old Jahi McMath alive or dead?” said Brendan P. Foht in WSJ.com. That’s the painful question doctors and lawyers in Oakland have been wrestling with since December, when the teenager suffered complications from a tonsillectomy at the city’s Children’s Hospital, and was subsequently declared brain-dead. Since then, doctors have fought a legal battle with Jahi’s mother to disconnect the eighth-grader from her ventilator, arguing that since no part of her brain is operating, she’s dead. But Nailah Winkfield, citing her Christian beliefs, insists that “as long as her child’s heart is beating, Jahi is still alive.” Who’s to say she’s wrong, given the “number of cases when apparently brain-dead patients have made miraculous recoveries?” This week, in a legal compromise approved by a California judge, the teen was transferred to an undisclosed care facility, where her mom will keep the machines operating through donated funds.

The sudden loss of a child would traumatize any parent, said Daniel Borenstein in the San Jose Mercury News. But using a machine to keep Jahi’s heart pumping won’t bring her back. “We’re not talking about someone in a coma”; three neurologists, including one appointed by a court to make an independent evaluation, say the girl has no brain function whatsoever, and therefore “no life to prolong.” Despite the emotion involved, this should not be a complicated case, said the Los Angeles Times in an editorial. By overruling doctors—and a medical standard of brain death accepted in every state in the nation—the judge has only muddied the waters for other families in these difficult circumstances. “It sends a message that families might be better equipped than doctors to decide when a patient is dead.”

If society goes down that road, said Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon.com,the result will be deep confusion. No one deemed fully brain-dead has ever recovered, so the insistence by Jahi’s family that there is hope is just not true. In an era in which machines can keep virtually any body operating indefinitely, giving every family the right to define death would be a nightmare. As medical ethicist Arthur Caplan put it, “It opens the floodgates for other people to say, ‘Oh, you don’t really know when we’re dead? So please make more efforts for my loved ones.’”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up