Posted on 08/02/2005 6:29:23 AM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
An appeal court has denied a terminally ill British man the assurance that his wish not to be starved to death once he becomes incapacitated will be respected to the end.
Former mailman Leslie Burke, 45, has a progressively degenerative disease that although leaving him fully conscious, will eventually rob him of the ability to swallow and communicate.
He petitioned the High Court last year to ensure that he would not be denied food and water once he was no longer able to articulate his wishes.
Burke won that right when judge James Munby ruled that if a patient was mentally competent -- or if incapacitated, had made an advance request for treatment -- then doctors were bound to provide artificial nutrition or hydration (ANH).
But last May, the General Medical Council (GMC) -- the medical licensing authority -- took the case to the Appeal Court, arguing that doctors had been placed "in an impossibly difficult position."
The appeal judges have now agreed, overturning the High Court judgment and upholding GMC guidelines on how to treat incapacitated patients.
Those guidelines give doctors the final say in whether a patient should be given life-sustaining "treatment," a term legally defined to include artificial feeding or hydration.
The latest ruling obliges doctors to provide life-prolonging treatment if a terminally ill and mentally competent patient asks for it.
However, once a patient is no longer able to express his or her wishes or is mentally incapacitated, doctors can withdraw treatment, including ANH, if they consider it to be causing suffering or "overly burdensome."
Ultimately, the court said, a patient cannot demand treatment the doctor considers to be "adverse to the patient's clinical needs."
Anti-euthanasia campaigner and author Wesley Smith told Cybercast News Service it was important Burke had taken the case to court because "it is now clear that a patient who can communicate desires cannot have food and water withdrawn.
"That is a line in the sand that is helpful."
However, he added, the judgment had "cast aside" those who were mentally incompetent or unable to communicate their wishes -- "those who bioethicists call non-persons because of incompetence or incommunicability.
"I believe that the judgment clearly implies that the lives of the competent are worth more than the lives of the incompetent since doctors can decide to end life-sustaining medical care, including ANH," said Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and author of Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America.
Burke was quoted as saying in reaction to the ruling that it held "no good news at all" for people who shared his concerns.
In the light of public health service cuts and underfunding, Burke said he was worried about "the decisions that will have to be made" by doctors in the future.
"I have come to realize that there are quite a few people who feel the same way I do," the Yorkshire Post quoted him as saying. "Not everyone wants to be put down. Not everyone wants their life to be ended prematurely."
Responding to the court's ruling, the GMC said it should reassure patients.
The council's guidelines made it clear "that patients should never be discriminated against on the grounds of disability," said GMC President Prof. Graeme Catto in a statement.
"We have always said that causing patients to die from starvation and dehydration is absolutely unacceptable practice and unlawful."
A professor of palliative medicine at Cardiff University, Baroness Ilora Finlay, supported the court ruling. "Stopping futile interventions allows natural death to occur peacefully," she argued in a British daily newspaper. "This is not euthanasia by the back door."
But the Disability Rights Commission (DRC) took a different view.
The commission was one of several campaigners, including right-to-life activists and patients' groups, which had strongly supported Munby's earlier ruling.
DRC Chairman Bert Massie expressed the group's dismay at the Appeal Court decision, saying it did nothing to dispel the fears of many disabled people that "some doctors make negative, stereotypical assumptions about their quality of life."
It had also "totally ignored" the rights of those who were unable to express their wishes, he added.
Answers do not end with a question mark, as I learned it in school. Perhaps your school was different.
If he cannot communicate a change in his wishes, then he would be obligated to live the rest of his life in what might, indeed, be awful suffering.
Nazi medical care system. Goebbels and Goering ethics. Is this the great British legal system that we inherited?
Well I propose that food given to inmates, especially pedophiles is artificial nutrition and hydration since they did nothing to earn the money to pay for it. Let them rot!
Feeding is not a futile intervention. This IS euthanasia, and it's right in our faces you dismal Labour Baron
ping
Although the headline brought to mind a well-publicized Florida lady's case, a simple reading of the first sentence of the article reveals this one is quite different.
This gentleman clearly needs to designate someone to speak on his behalf for the coming time when he is no longer able to communicate himself. So, I'm left wondering if the UK doesn't recognize a Healthcare Power of Attorney.
As long as his money hasn't run out, his wishes should be carried out. Then again, if this is socialized medicine, I suppose his money becomes a non-issue, and someone representing The People will necessarily decide when this man's wishes become too much of a burden for society to bear.
As usual, Socialism s*cks.
If you did this to a dog, you would be thrown in jail.
We save this treatment for lower life forms, like people who have become too burdensome for us to care for.
The truly scary thing is that the court decided that so long as he COULD speak his wishes, they had to feed him.
Meaning, it took a court decision to establish that the doctors could stop feeding him even when he could still beg them to feed him.
It appears that the health community wanted to be able to starve anybody who couldn't feed themselves, if the "health community" determined it was in the "patient's best interest" to be starved to death.
The court said NO!!!. So long as the person can personally tell you to feed them, you have to feed them. Once they CAN'T tell you to feed them, then you can starve them.
Depressing ping for further read...
While people will vehemently deny it, most cases where pet dogs are "put down" are requested to end the suffering of the people, not the dog; I think, in that respect, this ruling is for the same reasons.
I don't read it that way.
So, now all doctors must face their Maker someday after committing murder. Does not matter what the government calls it - they are not the ones that will be judging.
And, this decision just throws out the right to life of a human in the U.K.
A nation of ghouls.
Would you rather live as a result of your wish or be arbitrarily put to death on the whim of someone who thinks like . . . well like you for instance? If the potential inconvenience of pain is enough to put someone to death, especially by withholding food and water, then anything goes. If you really believe the tripe about it being pleasant to die without food or water, I challenge you to not take any liquids for 48 hours. Then come and tell us about not wanting someone to suffer needlessly.
And you should thank them for going "nuts". They are the only ones that care about how you are treated once the state deems you are unworthy.
Just why would any want to allow the "state" to determine when they die?
Idiots need to wake up and see the "sales job" that is being promoted here and all over. Sell the stupid public on the beauty of state initiated death, the beauty and honor in not "wasting resources" by the infirm, the joy of giving up all hope of life and instead dwell in the glory of death to further the greed of others.
Never thought the public was that stupid as they spend all their efforts on the right to bear arms (why?), the right to liberty, the right to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. All easily destroyed by the death cult promoting the wonder of killing off the "unneeded". How? Plays into the greed of humans for the assets of unloved relatives that could "with honor" be ushered on to death for their own gain.
Hope God is not watching those efforts. No, correct that - Hope God IS watching those efforts.
Agreed - they should accept the honor of death to save the resources of others. But, lo, the left want their votes. The seriously ill don't vote.
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