

Occasionally there comes a story that’s a mishmash of religion and ethics to the point where it’s unclear where one ends and the other begins. Such is this New Yorker piece on Jahi McMath, a 13-year-old Oakland, Calif., girl who went in to have her tonsils removed and ended up brain-dead.

Being that one of my daughter’s friends nearly died after a tonsillectomy, I knew how things can wrong really fast after one of those operations and how clueless the medical professionals can be. And, according to this tale, they ignored this child’s copious bleeding and obvious distress until her heart stopped a few hours later.

They got her breathing started again but declared her brain dead two days later. Days passed, but for her furious family, the battle had just begun. It was December 2013. The family hired a personal injury lawyer to, among other things, keep the hospital from pulling the ventilator plug.

Here’s where the religion part comes in:

A self-described “cafeteria Catholic,” he acted on a vague feeling that a child with a beating heart was not entirely dead. He wrote a cease-and-desist order: if doctors unplugged Jahi’s ventilator, he said, they would violate her and her family’s civil rights…In a separate motion, Dolan argued that the hospital was infringing on (the mother) Nailah’s right to express her religion. He said that, as a Christian, she believed that her daughter’s soul inhabited her body as long as her heart beat.

We never do learn in this story what kind of Christian the mom is, nor if her pastor or church played any role in the saga. When we first covered this in 2014, there was a similar haziness about specifics. We did find one newspaper that identified Jahi's mother as a Baptist. But other pastors were in the story.


Soon after that, the story links Jahi’s case to that of Terry Schiavo, a Florida woman who was in a vegetative state for 15 years and whose estranged husband eventually succeeded in getting her feeding tube disconnected. (She died two weeks later). Which is why Dolan, the lawyer, spirited Jahi away from her California hospital room and onto a plane.


The ensuing discussion is what gets into that mix of religion and ethics.


What follows is a lengthy discussion on the nature of death and whether it happens when breathing stops or when the brain ceases to function and also how definitions of death have been broadened in recent decades to allow for organ donation. Jahi ended up at a Catholic hospital where even its personnel were divided on whether the girl was dead or not. I would have liked to seen a quote from a Catholic ethicist at this point, but there was none.

Finally in July 2014, the family moves the girl into a private residence with constant nursing care while fighting for the right to not unplug their daughter. You can follow the case on Facebook here. The article continues to sprinkle teasing anecdotes on religion:


So, I’m not complaining here about a religion ghost per se, but only for the lack of specificity in terms of the religious practice of its central characters. Near the end of the piece, the family documents how Jahi – despite the lack of much of her brain tissue – reacts to what people tell her but moving a finger.

Then the story brings up a California neurologist who converted to Catholicism in college because he felt there must be an intelligence behind the complexity and beauty of life on Earth. The story explains how he helped change the views of the medical field as to what brain death is, mainly because of exceptions like Jahi and because he realized that our knowledge of the brain is so limited. I wish the reporter had let the doctor talk more about the theology behind his conclusions, as he obviously had some.

There’s more that I’ve not mentioned and the piece is certainly worth reading for the ethical problems it brings up. In one way, it's beautifully written but in another, there are so many missed opportunities for explaining why this issue needs some religious experts. I wish some kind of theological expertise had been included in it.

Life and death issues are not just a matter of ethics committees. To be on the brink of death is intensely theological and a lot of rich quotes could have come from that quarter.

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