Brain-dead pregnant woman's husband names fetus

DALLAS (AP) — The husband of a pregnant, brain-dead Texas woman who was taken off life support over the weekend named what would have been the couple's second child before his wife was removed from machines.

Erick Munoz said today that he named the 23-week-old fetus Nicole, which was his late wife's middle name. Munoz would not say why he chose to name the fetus.

Munoz said doctors at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth indicated to him that the fetus would likely have been a girl, though his attorneys previously said the fetus suffered from lower body deformation that made it impossible to determine a gender.

"They think it was a female," Munoz said in a brief telephone interview with The Associated Press.

Both the hospital, which initially refused to disconnect Marlise Munoz, and his attorneys agreed the fetus could not have been born alive that early in the pregnancy.

The fetus was not delivered when John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth complied Sunday with a judge's order to pull any life-sustaining treatment from Munoz. She was declared brain-dead in November, but the hospital had kept her on machines for the sake of the unborn child.