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 diazepam, dextropropoxyphene, and 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 respirator, which they believed constituted extraordinary means of prolonging her life, her parents filed suit to disconnect Karen from her ventilator.
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.
Early life, collapse, and coma
Karen Ann Quinlan was born on March 29, 1954, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to a young, unmarried 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 a daughter, Mary Ellen, in 1956, and a son, John, in 1957. Quinlan was remembered as an average student at 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. Karen 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 in order to fit into a dress that she had bought.
