Pro-Life Issues
Food and Water for Those in a Non-Responsive State
An August, 2007 story demonstrates, yet again, that people who are diagnosed as severely cognitively impaired (what you or I would call brain damaged) and who are not actively dying should - indeed must - be given food and water, through a feeding tube if necessary.
A 38-year old man described as being in a minimally conscious state has regained the ability to talk and eat after his brain was stimulated with electrodes.
He was beaten and left for dead one night in a robbery while walking home in 1999. His skull was crushed and his brain severely damaged. The doctor said if he pulled through at all, he'd be a vegetable for the rest of his life.
"For six years, the man could not speak or eat. On occasion he showed signs of awareness, and he moved his eyes or a thumb to communicate. His arms were useless. He was fed through a tube.""My son can now eat, speak, watch a movie without falling asleep," [his mother] said Wednesday while choking back tears during a telephone news conference. "He can drink from a cup. He can express pain. He can cry and he can laugh."
"The most important part is he can say, 'Mommy' and 'Pop.' He can say, 'I love you, Mommy' ... I still cry every time I see my son, but it's tears of joy." The progress of the patient, who remains unidentified at the family's request, is described more formally in a report in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
Frankly, no one should ever be described as a "vegetable." It is used to insult and dehumanize the person to whom it is applied. A more appropriate description would be that the patient is in a non-responsive, rather than vegetative, state. After all, a human being is not a tomato, and every human being deserves proper care for as long as he or she lives.
The question, of course, is what constitutes proper care, especially in difficult cases? How many of us would have completely supported the patient's family if they had chosen to have his feeding tube removed? How many people are dead today who might have improved significantly had we waited to "pull the tube?" Death cannot be negated by saying "oops, we made a mistake."
The moral use of nutrition and hydration - or the moral withdrawal of nutrition and hydration - is dependant upon the particular circumstances. Allowing death to occur naturally is very different than intending to cause death to occur unnaturally. Food and water, warmth and shelter are natural and humane means of providing comfort - not extraordinary means, and certainly not burdensome treatment.
If a person is dying of a terminal disease, and is unable to process food and water, (no matter how it is delivered, by mouth, intravenously, or tube feeding) then there is no moral or medical obligation to provide such nutrition or hydration. However, if a patient is not dying, then food and water must be provided. To argue otherwise leads to the discriminatory assumption that patients in a coma, or a non-responsive state, or who are suffering from Alzheimer's or dementia, are qualitatively different from other patients.
That assumption leads to the value judgment that some lives are not worth living, that the life of a patient in a non-responsive or impaired state is not meaningful. In so doing, the inherent, intrinsic dignity of all human beings, regardless of ability, is unjustly ignored.
