While my intent was to use the word “medical”, I think my typo was apropos. They aren’t administering medical treatment, it’s merely mechanically keeping the bellows and pump in her chest moving. When it comes to this kind of prolonging of bodily functions, I’m with Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, “You spend all this time figuring out if you could, you never stopped to think about whether you should.”
Yes, exactly. This dispute was almost certainly kicked off by the hospital's high-handed and supremely arrogant behavior toward this family.
Having been on the wrong end of such officious treatment by doctors and hospitals myself, I understand how this family feels. Many families are quickly cowed into submitting to having the plug pulled prematurely on a loved one. But every once in awhile, some relative will stand up and say "Like hell you won't!"
I wonder if there was a "transplant team" lurking in the background, just waiting to swoop in and "harvest" the girl's organs?
That is often the motivation behind hospital pressuring parents into too-hastily consigning their children to death.
And how many people know that the definition of "brain death" was conjured up just in the last few decades ... for the very purpose of promoting transplantion of "fresh" organs from still-living patients (i.e., still alive, by the traditional definition of death).
Such a rosy picture is painted by the organ transplant industry, that few people know the ugly truth about what actually happens when organs are "harvested" from a patient who has been declared "brain dead" (who, at that point, ceases to be considered a patient).
As the transplant surgeons cut into the un-anesthetized patient's donor's vital organs, his or her body often thrashes about violently ... even a "brain dead" patient resists this atrocious assault on his or her body.