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 Valium along with alcohol while on a crash diet and lapsed into a coma, followed by a persistent vegetative state.

Quinlan's case continues to raise important questions in moral theology, bioethics, euthanasia, legal guardianship and civil rights.

A significant outcome of her case was the development of formal ethics committees in hospitals, nursing homes and hospices.

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.

[3] 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.

She remained there for nine days in an unresponsive condition before she was transferred to Saint Clare's Hospital, a larger facility in Denville.

Quinlan had suffered irreversible brain damage after she had experienced an extended period of respiratory failure, lasting no more than 15–20 minutes.

[3] Hospital officials, faced with threats from the Morris County, New Jersey prosecutor of homicide charges being brought against them if they complied with the parents' request, joined with the Quinlan family in seeking an appropriate protective order from the courts before it would allow the ventilator to be removed.

He cited that Quinlan's doctors did not support removing her from the ventilator; whether or not to do so was a medical, rather than a judicial, decision; and doing so would violate New Jersey homicide statutes.

[4] The Quinlans' attorneys, Paul W. Armstrong and James M. Crowley, appealed the decision to the New Jersey Supreme Court.

[8][9] It is to that principle that Quinlan's parents appealed when they requested that the extraordinary means of a ventilator be removed, citing a declaration by Pope Pius XII from 1957.

Quinlan continued in a persistent vegetative state for slightly more than nine years, until her death from respiratory failure as a result of complications from pneumonia on June 11, 1985, in Morris Plains, New Jersey.

For these reasons (and the frequent nostalgic references to events from the 1970s in Coupland's works), the character is thought to be based on Quinlan.

Donna Levin’s novel Extraordinary Means is a literary fantasy in which a young woman, although diagnosed in an irreversible coma, also brought on by an accidental combination of drugs and alcohol, is able to observe her family members debate over whether or not to withdraw life support.