Posted on 08/09/2024 12:53:34 PM PDT by ebb tide
ROME – This week the Vatican’s Academy for Life issued a new text on a series of bioethical issues, including the provision of food and hydration for patients in a vegetative state, which marks a modest departure from the Vatican’s previously held position on the issue.
Published Thursday by the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAV), the volume is titled, “Small Lexicon on End of Life,” and covers a variety of bioethical issues.
According to an introduction by Italian Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, president of the PAV, the volume has the aim of “reducing at least that component of disagreement that depends on an imprecise use of the notions implied in speech.”
Namely, Paglia referred to “the statements that are sometimes attributed to believers and which are not rarely the result of cliches that have not been adequately scrutinized.
Among other things, the 88-page text reaffirms a blanket “no” to euthanasia and assisted suicide, but it also shifts toward a new openness from the Vatican when it comes to so-called “aggressive treatment,” specifically the requirement to provide food and hydration to patients in a vegetative state.
In section 13 of the volume, which deals with this issue of food and hydration, a reference is made to the recently published declaration of human dignity from the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), Dignitas Infinita.
In Dignitas Infinita, the DDF reiterated the need to avoid “every aggressive therapy or disproportionate intervention” in the treatment of patients with serious illnesses.
Likewise, the PAV’s new volume also invoked the July 2020 letter Samaritanus Bonus, which among other things mentioned “the moral obligation to exclude aggressive therapy” treatment plans.
The volume noted that the food and hydration prepared for vegetative patients are prepared in a laboratory and administered through technology, and thus do not amount to “simple care procedures.”
Doctors, the text said, are “required to respect the will of the patient who refuses them with a conscious and informed decision, even expressed in advance in anticipation of the possible loss of the ability express oneself and choose.”
They noted that for patients in a vegetative state, there are some who argue that when food and hydration are suspended, death is not caused by the illness but rather by those who suspend them.
This argument, the PAV said, “is the victim of a reductive conception of disease, which is understood as an alteration of a particular function of the organism, losing sight of the totality of the person.”
“This reductive way of interpreting disease then leads to an equally reductive concept of care, which ends up focusing on individual functions of the organism rather than the overall good of the person,” the volume says.
To this end, it quoted from a November 2017 speech from Pope Francis to members of the PAV in which he said that technical interventions on the body “can support biological functions that have become insufficient, or even replace them, but this is not equivalent to promoting health.”
“Therefore, an extra dose of wisdom is needed, because today the temptation to insist on treatments that produce powerful effects on the body, but which sometimes do not benefit the integral good of the person, is more insidious,” the text said, continuing the quotation of Pope Francis.
The PAV insisted that this position does not conflict with the position previously taken by the DDF on the issue of food and hydration, which was issued in 2007 in response to bishops in the United States on the moral obligation to provide food and water to patients in a vegetative state, even through artificial means.
In their brief response, the then-Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith held that even in a situation where there’s moral certainty that a patient will never recover, it was not permissible to withdraw food and water, as doing so would effectively allow the person to die of dehydration or starvation.
The position taken in the PAV’s new document marks a shift toward a new openness from this position, however, in their volume, the PAV insisted their stance does not mark a departure from the 2007 decision and, to this end, cited “ethically legitimate” reasons for suspending treatment included in the then-CDF’s response.
Among other things, the PAV noted that the then-CDF said it was possible to suspend treatment when it was no longer seen as “effective from a clinical point of view,” meaning when bodily tissues are “no longer able to absorb the administered substances,” and when it causes the patient “an excessive burden or significant physical discomfort linked, for example, to complications in the use of instrumental aids.”
In a bid to illustrate continuity in the Vatican’s position on the topic, the PAV volume said this last point from the 2007 response refers to the question of proportionality in the administration of treatments, and it argued that the DDF’s new document Dignitas Infinita, published in April, “moves along the same lines.”
The PAV’s new “lexicon” suggested that Dignitas Infinita be interpreted in a “long-term and broad-based perspective,” and it notes that the DDF text “does not elaborate an overall reflection on the relationship between ethics and the legal sphere.”
On this point, “the space therefore remains open for the search for mediations on the legislative level, according to the principle of ‘imperfect laws,’” the PAV said.
In terms of legal mediation on the issue, the PAV said, “In addressing the issues evoked by individual words, this lexicon takes into account the pluralistic and democratic context of the societies in which the debate takes place, especially when it enters the legal field.”
“The different moral languages are not at all incommunicable and untranslatable, as some claim,” the PAV said, insisting that dialogue is possible among those with differing views of the issue.
By allowing the space to be kept open for research on legislative mediation on the topic, Paglia in his introduction said that “in this way, believers assume their responsibility to explain to everyone the universal (ethical) sense disclosed in the Christian faith.”
No one should be surprised when Bergoglio's PAV approves abortion.
Ping
Nothing anyone said or did could stop them from starving Terry Schiavo to death; something that now seems to be a regular occurence under UK’s state-run-medicine.
A good friend's father was hospitalized a few years ago with a heart attack and hooked up to machines. The attending doctor didn't think the old man would make it.
My friend, respecting Dad's wishes to not be on machines, signed a paper approving the de-machining and putting the Dad on "comfort care" which (IN GENERAL) is basically no curative care.
That was ok - that was the Dad's wishes.
The old man pulled through, but the hospital refused to put Dad back on fluids or nutrition because - you guessed it - "comfort care" IN THAT HOSPITAL and for THAT DOCTOR is effectively Terri Schaivo-style starvation and dehydration.
They said, food and water was a medical treatment and thus "curative" and AGAINST the rules of "comfort care."
My friend was stunned. And the attending and her team wouldn't budge - ”you signed the document giving consent.”
For the next few days, my friend and siblings heard from scores of nurses etc that withholding fluids was effectively "the right thing to do"....very Terri Schaivo-like. They also threw in “Dad live a good long life” and “he will never come back the way he was.”
It took a virtual miracle whereby a different doctor intervened, said the father clearly wasn't terminal, and put the old man back on nutrition and fluids.
While my friend's Dad passed away peacefully in his sleep a few weeks later, it was on the Dad’s terms.
It’s also worth noting that the siblings were split on “comfort care.” It wasn’t a Catholic family. But they were God-fearing, and there WAS a view that it was ok for Dad to dehydrate to death. Someone even said that dehydration is painless; I hear the total opposite during the Schaivo murder.
Euthanasia is, technically, illegal. And I know many people would be OK if fluids were withheld when it is THEIR time to go. Fair enough.
But euthanasia can be made legal if you're not careful with the Fine Print or vetting the "mercy killing" mindset of the attending.
This latest legalistic abuse of language to put an imprimatur on putting Pop to sleep argues strongly for putting pen to paper.
maybe this new pronouncement may apply to the pope soon?
Worth reading, repeat or no. Well stated though the story makes my blood boil.
Pontifical Academy for Life (PAV),
Didn’t the Pope in name only gut that institution?
The volume noted that the food and hydration prepared for vegetative patients are prepared in a laboratory and administered through technology, and thus do not amount to “simple care procedures.”
What a bunch of claptrap. All medicine would come under this so called definition including those used to relieve pain and combat infections in these patients.
There are situations when the body can no longer process nutrition and to continue to provide it is futile and may simply prolong the natural process of death leading to more suffering. I don’t recall at what point the body can no longer process hydration. But how it is administered should not be the central ethical deciding factor on whether to withhold it.
I can’t speak for others, but your post was very Catholic.
Many of us prefer clear language vs a legalistic syntax that has more in common with Sotomayor than Aquinas.
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