In addition, Ms. Moskowitz said, "You could wonder about the effects of a child born of this arrangement. What kind of explanation is due this child, and what are the potential harms that could flow from that?"

Law enforcement sources said the young woman's family was motivated by the belief that she would not have wanted an abortion and by the desire to see a part of her live on.

The family declined to be interviewed, and Mr. Parrinello has released little information about her. He has also asked that she be accorded the anonymity usually granted rape victims who request it.

The authorities investigating the case, who have not made an arrest, have withheld the young woman's name from the public record and similarly have released little information about her.

But Gary Ciulla, an investigator with the Brighton Police Department, said that to see the young woman, whose blue eyes often follow a visitor around the room, is to get a haunting sense of the promise her life once held.

"You could see the remnants of her beauty," Mr. Ciulla said. "She was a beautiful girl."

Mr. Ciulla and others who have visited her say she breathes without the assistance of machines, responds physically to certain stimuli and can feel pain, but is completely uncommunicative and seems unaware of her surroundings.

As a result of her family's silence, little is known about her prognosis when she first lapsed into a coma in 1985, the choices her family faced in keeping her alive or the precise reasons they decided not to end her pregnancy, which was between four and a half and five months along when it was detected.