Vol.:(0123456789) Journal of Religion and Health (2020) 59:2935–2950 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-019-00952-1 1 3 ORIGINAL PAPER Assessment of Somatic Support Process for Pregnant Brain Death Patients Occurring in a Transition Country Between Asia and Europe from Medical, Ethical, Legal and Religious Aspects Ömer Faruk Boran 1  · Fatih Mehmet Yazar 2  · Murat Bakacak 3  · Dilek Soylu 4  · Nurullah Yazar 5  · Hafze Öksüz 1 Published online: 27 November 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract In spite of the fact that brain death during pregnancy is not a common occurrence, it is an important ethical problem for all cultures and religions can have a signifcant infuence on the donation decision after brain death. Therefore, this study aimed to present the case of a pregnant patient developing brain death which occurred in our intensive care unit and to compare the medical, ethical and legal problems relating to pregnant cases developing brain death with 24 cases in the literature. A 21-year- old 19-week pregnant case with gestational diabetes was monitored in the anesthe- sia intensive care unit and developed brain death due to intracranial mass and intra- ventricular hemorrhage. Though brain death is a situation well understood by organ transplant professionals, brain death developing in pregnant patients still involves many medical, ethical and legal problems. Keywords Brain death in pregnancy · Donation decision · Muslim families Introduction Brain death (BD), which was frst described by Mollaret and Goulon (1959), refers to irreversible loss of brain stem functions. Support of patients with BD diagno- sis is unnecessary apart from some situations like the patient being an organ donor and pregnancy (Esmaeilzadeh et al. 2010). Though support of patients developing BD who are organ donors until the organ transplant procedure is a common situa- tion encountered by organ transplant professionals, the support of pregnant patients developing BD until the birth of the baby is an extreme situation (Esmaeilzadeh et al. 2010; Wawrzyniak 2015; Gopčević et al. 2017). Since 1982, 24 patients with * Ömer Faruk Boran ofboran@ksu.edu.tr Extended author information available on the last page of the article