The birth of Susan Anne Catherine Torres - delivered by a brain-dead mother who was kept on life support to sustain the pregnancy - made medical history less than three years ago.
Now a malpractice lawsuit filed against one of the mother's doctors is raising legal questions about the degree to which a doctor's obligations and liabilities in treating a pregnant woman also extend to an unborn fetus.
Jason Torres, the father of Susan Anne and husband of Susan Michelle Torres, filed the suit last year in U.S. District Court in Alexandria (web|news) . He is seeking $15 million in damages against emergency-room physician Walter D. Dixon, who treated his wife in 2005 at Inova Alexandria Hospital.
The lawsuit holds Dixon responsible not only for the mother's death, but also the death of the baby, who lived only five weeks after dying of complications from a premature delivery.
"I think this is a unique case from a legal perspective," said the physician's lawyer, Joyce A.N. Massey, who declined to comment on specifics of the case.
In the lawsuit, Jason Torres alleges that the doctor dismissed as "morning sickness" symptoms that indicated a more serious problem. Those symptoms included memory lapses - witnessed by a nurse - in which Susan Michelle Torres couldn't recognize her husband when she was sitting next to him. Jason Torres' lawyer said further tests would have revealed bleeding on the brain.
The same day she was discharged from the hospital, Susan Michelle Torres fell into a coma from a brain hemorrhage caused by melanoma. She never regained consciousness.
At the time, she was about 14 weeks pregnant. Jason Torres made the decision to keep his wife on life support, with the hope that the baby could develop to the point of viability.
Doctors kept the mother on life support for three months, long enough for the fetus to become viable, and Susan Anne Catherine Torres was born 13 weeks prematurely. The next day her mother was taken off life support and died.
The birth captured international attention and was remarkable on several fronts. A review of English-language medical literature going back to 1979 found fewer than a dozen cases in which a brain-dead mother had given birth. Also, the doctors who cared for the baby said they were aware of no cases in which a brain-dead woman who also suffered from cancer had given birth.
The melanoma complicated matters because doctors were concerned the cancer would spread to the placenta and attack the fetus, making it risky to allow the fetus to gestate the full nine months.
For several weeks after she was born, the baby did well, despite being born premature and weighing less than 2 pounds. But an intestinal disorder and infection overwhelmed the 5-week-old baby, and she died in September 2005.
The legal system has struggled with how to interpret case law and statutes because of the unique circumstances of the case. Before the case was filed in federal court, for example, two different Fairfax County (web|news) judges disagreed on whether the suit could go forward under Virginia law, with varying interpretations of whether the fetus could be considered a "patient" and different opinions on the relevance of various precedents in malpractice law.
The case was filed in federal court before it reached a resolution in the state's system.
In court papers, the doctor's lawyer argued that because the baby "was never a patient of Dr. Dixon, no legally cognizable duty exists on the part of Dr. Dixon to Baby."
Torres' attorney, Gary Mims, acknowledged that the facts surrounding the case are unique, but he said the legal issues are fairly straightforward.
Mims said it's clear that a doctor would be negligent for, say, prescribing medications to a pregnant woman that are known to harm a fetus, and that the negligence alleged in this case is no different.
"The facts and circumstances make it easy to cloud the issues from a defense standpoint," he said.
Mims acknowledged that, ultimately, there was nothing Dixon could have done that day to save the mother's life from such an aggressive, advanced melanoma. But he said that proper care could have allowed her to live longer and perhaps carry the baby to term.
The defense contends the mother was on life support and was able to carry the fetus just as long as she could have if she were conscious.
Jason Torres, who now lives in Spring, Texas, did not immediately respond to questions submitted through his attorney.
The suit, which is scheduled for a pretrial hearing Friday, also names as a defendant Emergency Medical Associates, the company that employs Dixon and holds the contract to provide ER physicians to the hospital.
The trial is scheduled for September.
NewsChannel 8 to leave comments on news stories.