Brain-dead Texas woman taken off ventilator

An emotional court fight came to an end Sunday when a brain-dead, pregnant Texas woman was taken off a ventilator.

In a case where who is considered alive, dead, and how it all changes in presence of a fetus culminated at about 11:30 a.m. Sunday when the devices that had kept Marlise Munoz’s heart and lungs working for two months were switched off.

«May Marlise Munoz finally rest in peace, and her family find the strength to complete what has been an unbearably long and arduous journey,» the lawyers, Heather King and Jessica Janicek, said in a written statement.

Munoz was 14 weeks pregnant with the couple’s second child when her husband found her unconscious on their kitchen floor November 26. Although doctors had pronounced her brain dead and her family wished to keep her off life suppoty, officials at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth said state law required them to maintain life-sustaining treatment for a pregnant patient.