ABSTRACT
In the mid-1970s, the father of Karen Ann Quinlan, a young woman who lay in a persistent vegetative state (PVS), wished to authorize disconnection of his daughter’s ventilator. He had to go to court because various physicians, the hospital in which his daughter was a patient, the state attorney general, and the county prosecutor, among others, objected to the withdrawal of ventilator support. The New Jersey Supreme Court’s seminal ruling in 1976, authorizing the ventilator’s disconnection, transformed Ms. Quinlan into the first of three famous female figures in the law of end-of-life decision making. The most commonly recognized public images of end-of-life litigation in America since then have been those of young women lying in bed as loving family members clustered around them (Miles, 1990). Quinlan and cases involving young women in Missouri and Florida have captured the public attention and provided three female faces to associate with end-of-life medical decision making.
