I can't believe FReepers on this thread are actually advocating euthanizing this woman. Food and water are basic human rights, not medical interventions that can be withdrawn at whim. Withholding food and water from a patient able to eat from a spoon is homicide. Feeding someone is not a "life-saving measure." Its simple human decency.
No health care worker or facility has any obligation under traditional Judeo-Christian medical ethics to assist a patient in suicide.
To claim otherwise illustrates once more the real dangers of radical libertarianism.
We better all wake up to this active euthanasia or soon we too are going to be coerced into a duty to die under ObamaCare rationing of care.
How is setting forth one's specific wishes, in advance, in a legally-binding document, "at a whim"?
Withholding food and water from a patient able to eat from a spoon is homicide.
No - despite your hyperbole, it is not. Not when that person has instructed as much in their living will and/or with their power-of-attorney. People have a legal right, in advance, to refuse such measures.
Feeding someone is not a "life-saving measure." Its simple human decency.
My mother, who could no longer walk, talk, sit upright, feed herself & was constantly soiling herself would have a different definition of "decency".
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There is a gulf of difference between taking no more active measures to save life or cure illness (if a person desires not to have them and has legally arranged that), and being starved to death. A person with a "Living Will" stating "Do Not Feed Me or Give Me Water" is saying "Actively Starve Me To Death". IOW, such a person is asking others to murder him. No one is legally obligated to starve or dehydrate anyone to death no matter what papers have been signed; in fact if they do so, they are guilty of murder.
To make it crystal clear - a person can choose NOT to have surgery, drugs or other active medical measures, if they so choose. But nutrition is NOT a "medical measure" - it's like breathing air. Could a person leave some legal papers saying "don't allow me to breathe air when I can't talk anymore"? Food, water and air are not "medical intervention", they are simple life sustaining basics that no doctor can prescribe or proscribe.
There is one argument on the thread that if with holding food and water from someone is murder, then why are people who starve others to death not arrested and charged with murder?
Answer - because the culture of death has ascendency. In Germany it was perfectly legal to kill the "unwanted" - those who murdered (by whatever method) those considered "unwanted" - whether incurably ill, mentally deficient, psychotic patients, amputees, and finally Jews, gypsies, political opponents and so on - were breaking no laws at all. Never a possibility of being arrested and charged with a crime.
Because in Germany, it was not a crime to kill the unwanted.
Here it supposedly is still a crime (I guess) but due to culture of death, too many people turn a blind eye, and much of the medical profession and legal system not only ignore such murders, but assist and indeed, implement.
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