Vatican answers query about Terri Schiavo 2 years later: NO removing feeding tubes on PVS patients

More than two years after Terri Schiavo died and more than 15 after she was (by most accounts) last known to be conscious, the issues raised by her case continue to make headlines.

The ethical and moral dilemmas surrounding the end of life can be some of the most difficult and heartrending that most people ever face, and Ms. Schiavo’s long coma and the struggle over who should decide what to do about it attracted huge attention and sent off political and social shock waves that still reverberate.

Even the Vatican, whose views on matters of life and death tend to be fairly absolute, had to deliberate for two years over how to answer a request for guidance on cases like Ms. Schiavo’s that was posed by American bishops after she died in 2005. It gave its response this morning.

Agence France Presse quotes the question posed by the bishops: “When nutrition and hydration are being supplied by artificial means to a patient in a ‘permanent vegetative state,’ may they be discontinued when competent physicians judge with moral certainty that the patient will never recover consciousness?”

And the answer, from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office in charge of laying down the law: “No. A patient in a ‘permanent vegetative state’ is a person with fundamental human dignity and must, therefore, receive ordinary and proportionate care which includes, in principle, the administration of water and food even by artificial means.”

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/still-more-fallout-from-the-terry-schiavo-case/?hp

Damn idiots!

I'm talking yer Catholics, Southron Baptists, Muslims, and what have you...

Well, they're really pretty backward and stupid for it, aren't they? Let's face facts, folks.

But things like this makes me glad I'm a Pagan

:)

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dudes dressed in medieval garb dictate medical decisions and these "celibate" (hah!) guys dictate people's sex and marriage choices?

I always wonder why people go along with religious dogma of any stripe.

to remove my father from 5 machines that were living for him and made a similar decision about my mother five years later. I have never had a second thought or a moment of guilt. This Church which hides and supports pedophiles has no business telling anyone how to live or how to die.