Making Sense Of Bioethics by Fr. Tad Pacholczyk: Should You Have A Living Will?Many people believe they can exercise better control over their own destiny by filling out a living will (also called an "advance directive.") They may have concerns about becoming caught in a tangle of tubes, wires and technology as they are dying, unable to break free and extricate themselves. They hope that by signing on the dotted line, they may be able to breathe their last "easily and peacefully." At first glance, an advance directive may appear to address many of our end-of-life concerns, and hence, can seem like a good idea, but it often tends to serve as a rather "blunt instrument" when it comes to handling complex and nuanced end-of-life situations. Moreover, living wills are sometimes used to buttress or justify some of the morally problematic decisions being made in health care settings today.
I was with him, right up until the last paragraph. He may be right that assigning a health care proxy is better than trying to spell out every possible health care situation that might arise in the future. But I'm still having a problem with the concept that we should assign a person to decide whether we live or die. It's now generally accepted that somebody has to make the decision. Can we ever go back to a policy in which nobody gets to decide whether or not to murder the patients? Can we just decide in advance that nobody get to commit murder, and leave it at that?
The whole thing is one paragraph. The formatting is awful :-)
>> the freedom to make our own health care decisions implies that we have moral obligations and duties, one of which is to be certain that we are using all the "ordinary" or "proportionate" interventions necessary to maintain our life and health. To put it simply, those medical treatments, medications, and procedures that offer reasonable hope to protect and preserve life without grave burden to oneself or another are ordinary care, and are required as part of our duty to care for ourselves.
Rightly so, but I don't think that's what we choose a health proxy for. The proxy simply stands in for us if we are incapable of making medical decisions. That means overseeing our course of treatment, not (necessarily) ending it. A so-called living will cannot anticipate the future or the state of medical science, but a proxy will be there to guide things in a human way. Makes FAR more sense to me.