BASIC CARE, HUMAN DIGNITY, AND CARE FOR MEDICALLY VULNERABLE PERSONS

Physical and cognitive disability should not mean one’s situation is considered “end of life,” yet too many persons who are not dying are described this way.

By Bobby Schindler for 

Charlotte Lazier Institute

Earlier this year, Oregon’s state legislature considered a bill that would have increased the number of medically vulnerable persons at risk of an untimely death. Oregon’s SB 494 would have redefined food and water delivered by a cup or spoon—everyday utensils—as a regulated, physician-controlled form of “medical care” rather than the “basic and ordinary” care that common sense suggests.

In Oregon, patients who are awake, conscious, and aware—but were unable to feed themselves due to disability, brain injury, or lack of physical mobility—would have faced the real chance of being denied food and water.[i] Fortunately, despite Oregon’s Senate passage in a 17–13 vote, the House referred the bill to a committee where it was tabled for the session.

However, as disconcerting as such a bill is, a much less understood and equally pernicious reality is this: It is already legal in every state to withhold or deny food and water by means of a feeding tube to patients who are not actively dying and not facing any active “end of life” issue.


Article continues here

Bobby Schindler is Associate Scholar at the Charlotte Lozier Institute and President of the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network.

 

The goal of the Charlotte Lozier Institute is to promote deeper public understanding of the value of human life, motherhood, and fatherhood, and to identify policies and practices that will protect life and serve both women’s health and family well-being. Our profound conviction is that the insights available through the best science, sociology and psychology cannot help but demonstrate that each and every human is not only “fearfully and wonderfully made” but blessed to be born at this time in human history.  For more information, please use this link.