‘Grotesque’ to keep woman on life support

To continue life support treatment for a corpse in order to sustain the unlikely viability of an unborn baby in its womb would be going "from the extraordinary to the grotesque," the High Court was told yesterday.

The statement was made by Peter McKenna, consultant obstetrician at the Rotunda Hospital, when he was giving expert evidence to a three-judge division of the court hearing an application for the discontinuance of life support for the “deceased” mother.

The woman in her 20s, who cannot be identified for legal reasons, was referred to several times in the day-long hearing as “brain dead”, deceased, “a corpse”, and “like a dead body”.