By PAULA SPAN - THE NEW YORK TIMES
Added: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 UTC

Thanks to Just Plain Cliff for the link
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In the book I discussed last week, Zoe FitzGerald Carter’s “Imperfect Endings,” a woman growing increasingly incapacitated from Parkinson’s disease deliberately stops eating and drinking so she can die in her home with her children and grandchildren nearby. It’s a controversial decision, both within her own family and in the society at large, but it’s a legal one — and a personal one that doesn’t require any bureaucracy’s blessing.

Where the picture grows murkier is in institutions like hospitals and nursing homes, which have their own formal policies and informal routines about treatment at the end of life and how much weight a patient’s expressed desires carry. We’ve all heard bitter tales of advance directives sometimes being ignored and overridden, of family members having to fight to have their loved ones’ final wishes honored.

In the 600 Catholic hospitals and hundreds of Catholic nursing homes around the country, such issues may grow more contentious in the wake of a new directive adopted by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

As Harris Meyer recently reported in Kaiser Health News, the directive establishes “an obligation to provide patients with food and water, including medically assisted nutrition and hydration” for those who can’t eat or drink, and it specifically includes patients in “chronic and presumably irreversible conditions.”
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TAGGED: LAW, MEDICINE, RELIGION