Karen Ann Quinlan was twenty-one years old on the night she went
into a coma. After mixing valium and alcohol, Quinlan stopped
breathing, and by the time she arrived at the hospital, she had
gone thirty minutes with no oxygen to the brain. Barely alive,
she was put on a respirator and feeding tube as she steadily
slipped into a deeper coma. Over the following three months,
Karen Ann lost weight and shriveled into a fetal position only
to sleep, wake and spasm. Her parents, Joseph and Julia Quinlan,
along with their priest decided to stop life support, but the
doctors refused. Joseph and Julia petitioned the court for the
right to remove life support, and their case, In the Matter of
Karen Quinlan, sparked a national debate about the government's
role in life and death. The Quinlan family's story and trial is
the setting for Jill Lepore's paper, Dead or Alive: Matters of
life and death and the American body politic. Lepore, the Kemper
Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff
writer for T