This is my last response to you. I've had a family member beg to have life sustaining treatment stop. We have that right to deny medical treatment to ourselves. No moral dilemnia, this doesn't degrade us more as humans - beyond what the artificial means of extending our life does.
To me the culprit is the artificial extension of life at a point when I am no longer able to ever return to a state of consciousness where I can see my family. That articifial extension is immoral.
Food and water are neither artificial, nor immoral. Depriving anyone, even a lowly animal, of food and water is extremely immoral.
If a free person speaks and says -- "No more water, no more food, no more medicine, no more life-support for me -- now!", we might try to cajole a positive response, but without too much delay, we should follow those currently expressed wishes. If the person is a criminal, a prisoner, even a vital witness -- we force him or her to be sustained.
But we pay NO heed to another person's word -- even a spouse or parent -- that a person wants to die. We can't give away what is not ours to give. Nor do we assist a suicide -- suicide differs from refusal of a medicine, or food, or water, because each those individual acts of refusal can be undone later if the mind is changed -- an act that causes a death directly can not be undone. Nor do we pay any heed to a prior contract -- a "living will", whatever to assume that what a person said when in the full sense of health that he would not want to live uner "those" conditions. For no one knows what will be in their mind when that condition (G-d forbid) happens. Ask those who have been through it! People who have come through PVS, through coma, through permanent severe impairments come in many many cases to deny their pre-wishes made when healthy and hardy, and instead come to choose to continue to want to live. Just look at Stephen Hawkings, or Chris Reed -- the will to live is primal.
My brother died of cancer a few years ago.
He had directives to have no life sustaining measure done on him. They waited until his children could be by his side, and they pulled the plug on him.
It's a personal decision and should be respected.
When my twin daughters were 6 weeks old, both of them almost died of a respiratory virus. One was on a vent for a week, and the other was on a vent for a month.
At one point, the one that was on a vent for a month almost had to be put on a heart/lung machine. On New Year's Eve, we were celebrating one of them getting off the vent and the other one started spiraling downward. The doctor started talking to my husband and I about how bad my daughter was doing. I think she was trying to prepare us for my daughter dying, but I couldn't handle the conversation. I told the doctor to stop talking, and I left the room. Thank God, after a blood transfusion my daugter started doing better.
Today, my daughters are almost 10. The one that was on a vent for a week does have brain damage, but she is a great kid. The one that was on a vent for a month is extremely gifted and the sweetest little girl.
It is very tough to be in life/death situations. I'm thankful that I never had to make any decisions about my daughters. It would have haunted me the rest of my life.