Editing Karen Ann Quinlan (section)

==Legal battle==
Quinlan's parents, Joseph Quinlan and Julia Quinlan, requested that she be disconnected from her ventilator, which they believed constituted extraordinary means of prolonging her life because it caused her pain.<ref name="Nessman" /> However, the [[Morris County, New Jersey|Morris County]] prosecutor threatened to press homicide charges against the hospital if it complied with the parents' request. Hospital officials joined with the Quinlan family in seeking an appropriate protective order from the courts before the hospital would allow the ventilator to be removed.

===Suit and appeal===
{{Main|In re Quinlan}}

The Quinlans filed a suit on September 12, 1975, to request that the extraordinary means prolonging Karen Ann Quinlan's life be terminated. The Quinlans' lawyers argued that the parents’ right to make a private decision about their daughter's fate superseded the state's right to keep her alive, while Karen's court-appointed guardian argued that disconnecting her ventilator would constitute homicide. The parents' request was denied by [[New Jersey Superior Court]] Judge Robert Muir Jr. in November 1975. He cited Quinlan's doctors as not supporting removing her from the ventilator, and he stated that whether or not to do so was a medical rather than a judicial decision. Muir also maintained that removing the ventilator would violate New Jersey homicide statutes.<ref>{{cite book |last=Heimer|first=Carol|chapter=The Unstable Alliance of Law and Morality|editor1-last=Hitlin |editor1-first=Steven |editor2-last=Vaisey |editor2-first=Stephen|date=December 6, 2012 |title=Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research|publisher=Springer |pages=181–182 |isbn=978-1441968951}}</ref>

The Quinlans' attorneys, Paul W. Armstrong and James M. Crowley, appealed the decision to the [[New Jersey Supreme Court]]. On March 31, 1976, the court granted their request, holding that the right to privacy was broad enough to encompass the Quinlans' request on their daughter's behalf.

When Quinlan was removed from her ventilator in May 1976, she surprised many by continuing to breathe unaided. Her parents never sought to have her feeding tube removed. "We never asked to have her die. We just asked to have her put back in a natural state so she could die in God's time," Julia Quinlan said.<ref name="Nessman" /> Quinlan was moved to a nursing home, where she was fed by artificial nutrition for nine more years. She died from respiratory failure on June 11, 1985.<ref name="Stryker">{{cite news |last=Stryker |first=Jeff |date=March 31, 1996 |title=Right to Die; Life After Quinlan |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/31/weekinreview/right-to-die-life-after-quinlan.html |newspaper=The New York Times |access-date=August 30, 2015 }}</ref><ref>[https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=qwgjAAAAIBAJ&sjid=jc4FAAAAIBAJ&pg=4910,299074&dq=karen-ann-quinlan&hl=en "Karen Ann Quinlan dies after 10 years in a coma"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151024071603/https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=qwgjAAAAIBAJ&sjid=jc4FAAAAIBAJ&pg=4910,299074&dq=karen-ann-quinlan&hl=en |date=2015-10-24 }}, ''St. Petersburg (FL) Evening Independent'', June 12, 1985, p. 1</ref><ref>[https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=12643283625542054584&q=355+A.2d+647+(NJ.+1976)&hl=en&as_sdt=2,5 In Re Quinlan] 355 A.2d 647 (NJ 1976)</ref>

===Extraordinary means===
[[Catholic moral theology]] does not require that "extraordinary means" be employed to preserve a patient's life. Such means are any procedure which might place an undue burden on the patient, family, or others and which would not result in reasonable hope of benefiting the patient. It is considered ethical for a person (or a person's representative in cases where the individual is not able to decide for themselves) to refuse extraordinary means of treatment even if doing so will hasten natural death.<ref>{{cite journal|last=McCartney|first=James|title=The Development of the Doctrine of Ordinary and Extraordinary Means of Preserving Life in Catholic Moral Theology before the Karen Quinlan Case|journal=Linacre Quarterly|date=1980|volume=47 |issue=215}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|journal=Health Progress|date=March 1985|title=Catholic theology and the right to die|last=Coleman|first=Gerald|volume=66|issue=2|pages=28–32|pmid=10270328}}</ref> It is to this Catholic principle that Quinlan's parents appealed when they requested that the extraordinary means of a ventilator be removed, citing a declaration by [[Pope Pius XII]] from 1957.<ref name="Stryker"/><ref>{{cite book|last=Scheb|first=John|title=Criminal law|date=March 28, 2011|publisher=Wadsworth Publishing|isbn=978-1111346959|page=85}}</ref>