The Case of Karen Ann Quinlan

A Dangerous Cocktail.

In an early hour of the morning of 15 April 1975, Julia and Joseph Quinlan of Landing, New Jersey, received the call every parent dreads. The nurse in the intensive-care unit at Newton Memorial Hospital called to tell them that their twenty-one-year-old adopted daughter, Karen, had been brought to the emergency room. That night Karen had been at a friend's birthday party, where she drank gin and tonics and swallowed tranquilizers. After she came home her roommates checked on her, and when they discovered she was not breathing, they called the police.

Coma.

By the time her parents saw her, she had lapsed into a coma. The doctors believed her brain damage was caused by a lack of oxygen, and the damage was irreversible, but they were unsure of the exact reason she stopped breathing. They placed her on a respirator, but within days of her admission she began to assume a fetal position. Her family...

[The entire page is 752 words long]

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