Oh, my, what a predicament. Jahi McMath has been released from Oakland Hospital to the custody of the coroner and her family. She has been issued a death certificate. And she's being transferred to an undisclosed care center, where it is hoped she will begin receiving artificial nutrition. This is the height of both irony and tragedy.The comments by physicians and bioethicists in the CNN articles all harken to the idea that there appears to be no error, she meets criteria for brain death and thus she's "legally dead." This misses the point. Her parents don't care if she's "legally dead." The legal definition does not comport with their own intuitions about death and her mother says as much. She will accept that her daughter is dead only when her heart stops beating. I can understand why a person may take this stance.
