You have a point, but those surely are bizarre and extremely unusual situations. Even if they are not, they cannot be equated with depriving an otherwise viable patient of food and water, which really is nothing other than murder.
I wonder if we really have different issues trying to be addressed - one is a question of euthansia, which is always wrong, being murder; and the other is to what extent are ultra-exceptional methods justified for someone who would otherwise naturally die?
Deprive someone of water? Like the Terry Schiavo case, clearly murder.
Removing a dialysis machine? That’s harder to say, I don’t presume to know the answer, just making the distinction.
The Act has never been used to withhold or withdraw food and water - and food and water by mouth, as in Terri’s case, doesn’t come under the law.
It’s only been invoked on those cases that I laid out in my last post. The purpose of the ethics committee is to review the decision of the doctor to go against the family’s wishes.
Unfortunately, the problem is that some of the people mentioned in the original article believe that life should be sustained as long as possible, whatever it takes, and at all costs. I even heard arguments that the patient’s suffering has religious value and that I should inflict suffering on unconscious patients if the family demands it.
Those of us who had been working on the tweaks that the Bill needed had had an agreement from everyone to make sure that food and water could not be called a medical treatment,even before the session began - on paper by the time the Bill came up in Committee. The problem was some people kept demanding a bill forcing doctors to continue the treatment that the families demand until transfer, with all of the legal protection that we had had before stripped from the Act.
Finally we had a substitute bill that gave families 14 days instead of 2 to get together before the ethics committee met, and another 2 weeks to arrange transfer to another doctor. (Although, in reality, the transfer efforts have always been underway even before the doc asks the ethics committee to meet. The process has always been for cases like those I described, where families demand that the doctor do what they want, against his best judgment. The blood transfusion case is the only one that I know of where the patient was making his own decisions. The docs suggested continuing the transfusions for a specific period of time to get ready, then transfer to hospice care. He demanded non-stop transfusions, even as his liver failed and his kidneys were damaged by the waste products from the break down of the transfused red blood cells - in other words, even as the transfusions damaged his kidneys, risking a need for dialysis.)
The agreed-upon substitute Bill died because it made it to the House on the last day bills could be introduced. The Dems in the House were playing games - long conversations at the microphone about “dog parks,” etc., and made sure that a lot of legislation was stalled on the last days - legal deadlines passed and bills will have to wait ‘till ‘09.
Some patients do not want dialysis. They cannot adapt to it. In that case, it’s the patient’s call imo. Some can tolerate it and some just cannot.