Word: coma
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Since she lapsed into a coma more than eight months ago, Karen Anne Quinlan, 21, has become the center of an anguished controversy over her right to life-or death (TIME, Nov. 24 et ante). Described by her consulting doctors as being in "a vegetative state," Quinlan is breathing with the aid of a respirator, and her brain continues to send out the faintest of signals. A Morris County, N.J., court denied her adoptive parents' petition for the right to cut off the respirator that keeps Karen alive. Last week the Quinlans filed their first written arguments in what...
...purpose is to cover himself just to make sure there was no foul play." Whatever the motive, it appears that Quinlan's life-style underwent some marked changes during the months before she took the combination of drugs and alcohol that is believed to be responsible for the coma. She apparently fell into a depression in midspring, when a close relationship came to an end. Karen and another woman had once been inseparable, according to companions; but when the friendship ended, Karen was seriously upset...
...eleven days, Superior Court Judge Robert Muir Jr. of Morris County, N.J., pondered the painful, unprecedented legal problem: Did the anguished parents of 21-year-old Karen Anne Quinlan have the right to switch off the respirator that had kept her alive since she fell into a deep coma in April? Last week Muir announced his decision. In a 44-page ruling, he noted sadly that he had to discount "the compassion, empathy, sympathy" he felt toward the Quinlan family. Both "judicial conscience and morality," he went on, told him that Karen's fate was being handled properly...
Joseph Quinlan, a modest drug-company section supervisor, loves his adopted daughter, Karen Anne. That is why the squarely built man with the short graying hair found himself in court last week, pleading for permission to let her die. Karen, 21, has been in a coma since the early morning of April 15, her breathing maintained by a machine called a respirator. By all accounts she has shriveled into something scarcely human. She weighs only 60 Ibs., and she is unable to move a muscle, to speak or to think. One doctor testified last week that she had become...
...others admit that, when faced with death, the natural reaction is to cling to life. Robert Cleath, 47, a speech professor at California Polytechnic State University and a part-time Presbyterian minister in Cambria, Calif., has watched in anguish while his son Rob, now 23, has vegetated in a coma since an auto accident five years ago. Even though Rob shows no signs of recovery, his father has no intention of letting him die. "Why? Because I love my son. God is the author of life and no one has the right to take a life, not even...