From what’s been reported about Marlise’s case, the hospital, executing the will of the state, has been making all of the calls about the care of the fetus, now about 21 weeks along. (The threshold for viability is generally considered to be 24 weeks.) But if there’s a premature birth and quick death, Marlise’s husband and parents will presumably be expected to deal with that.

And if a baby is born with severe and enduring ailments, Marlise’s husband and parents will presumably inherit the effort to give that child a decent quality of life, which is a concept that goes strangely missing in too many disputes over the unborn.

In other words they’ll possibly confront a slew of decisions “downstream from a decision that they already made and that got overruled,” the one to remove her from machines, said Hyagriv Simhan, the chief of maternal-fetal medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. “It’s quite complex.”

That’s one word for it. Cruel is another.