Karen Ann Quinlan

Karen Ann Quinlan (March 29, 1954 – June 11, 1985) was an American woman who became an important figure in the history of the right to die controversy in the United States.

When she was 21, Quinlan became unconscious after she consumed Valium along with alcohol while on a crash diet and lapsed into a coma, followed by a persistent vegetative state.

After doctors refused the request of her parents (Joseph and Julia Quinlan) to disconnect Karen's ventilator, her parents filed suit to get her disconnected.

The parents believed that her still being connected constituted extraordinary means of prolonging her life.

Quinlan's case continues to raise important questions in moral theology, bioethics, euthanasia, legal guardianship and civil rights.

Her case has affected the practice of medicine and law around the world.

A significant outcome of her case was the development of formal ethics committees in hospitals, nursing homes and hospices.

Quinlan was born on March 29, 1954, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to a young woman of Irish American ancestry.

A few weeks later, she was adopted by Joseph and Julia Quinlan, devout Roman Catholics who lived in the Landing section of Roxbury Township, New Jersey.

Julia and Joseph also had daughter Mary Ellen in 1956 and son John in 1957.

Quinlan attended Morris Catholic High School in Denville, New Jersey.

After graduation, she worked at the Mykroy Ceramics Corporation in Ledgewood, New Jersey, from 1972 to 1974, and worked several jobs over the next year.

Quinlan was a singer, and her parents remember her as a tomboy.

In April 1975, shortly after she turned 21, Quinlan left her parents' home and moved with two roommates into a house a few miles away in Byram Township, New Jersey.

Around the same time, she went on a radical diet, reportedly to fit into a dress that she had bought.

On April 15, 1975, a few days after moving into her new house, Quinlan attended a friend's birthday party at a local bar, then known as Falconer's Lackawanna Inn, on Lake Lackawanna in Byram.

She had eaten almost nothing for two days.

At the party, she reportedly drank several gin and tonics and took Valium.

Shortly afterwards, she felt faint and was quickly taken home and put to bed.

When friends checked on her about 15 minutes later, they found that she was not breathing.

An ambulance was called, and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was attempted.

Eventually, some color returned to her pallid skin, but she did not regain consciousness.

Quinlan was admitted in a coma to Newton Memorial Hospital in Newton, New Jersey.

She remained there for nine days in an unresponsive condition before she was transferred to Saint Clare's Hospital, a larger facility in Denville.

Quinlan weighed 115 lb when admitted to the hospital.

Quinlan had suffered irreversible brain damage after she had experienced an extended period of respiratory failure, lasting no more than 15–20 minutes.

No precise cause of her respiratory failure has been given.

Her brain was damaged to the extent that she entered a persistent vegetative state.

Her eyes were "disconjugate" (they no longer moved in the same direction together).

Her EEG showed only abnormal slow-wave activity.

Over the next few months, she remained in the hospital and her condition gradually deteriorated.

She lost weight and eventually weighed less than 80 lb. She was prone to unpredictable, violent thrashing of her limbs.

She was given nasogastric feeding and a ventilator to help her breathe.

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.

Hospital officials, faced with threats from the Morris County, New Jersey prosecutor of homicide charges being brought against them if they complied with the parents' request, joined with the Quinlan family in seeking an appropriate protective order from the courts before it would allow the ventilator to be removed.

The Quinlans filed a suit on September 12, 1975, to request the extraordinary means prolonging Karen Ann Quinlan's life to 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, and her court-appointed guardian argued that disconnecting her ventilators would be homicide.

The request was denied by New Jersey Superior Court Judge Robert Muir Jr. in November 1975.

He cited that Quinlan's doctors did not support removing her from the ventilator; whether or not to do so was a medical, rather than a judicial, decision; and doing so would violate New Jersey homicide statutes.

The Quinlans' attorneys, Paul W. Armstrong and James M. Crowley, appealed the decision to the New Jersey Supreme Court.