In the United Kingdom, a judgement has just been passed on a 72 year-old “paralysed” woman whose care has been the subject of a family feud. The guardianship judge in Preston believes that the treatments “keeping this patient alive” can be stopped.
This woman is in a state of minimal consciousness following a fall in 2016 which triggered an aneurysm. The medical team wanted to continue artificial feeding but her relatives had different views. Her sisters hoped to see an improvement in her condition over time whilst her daughters and spouse were against continued treatment. As far as the judge is concerned, the woman would have viewed her situation as an “intolerable” and “humiliating” “travesty of life”. He based this on an e-mail she sent to her daughter almost four years before her fall, “in which she expressed her fear of ending up in a similar situation“.
BBC (30/10/2017)