The great day has arrived. The Mental Capacity Act 2005 is now in effect.
Though I'm not sure how many people who take out an LPA are aware that the withdrawal of "treatment" includes denying water, so patients in hospital can be made to die slowly of thirst ("Since a landmark House of Lords judgment in 1993, providing food and water to those who cannot eat or drink for themselves counts as treatment as well."). And no-one can be certain what is felt by someone who is apparently in a coma.
Doesn't this conflict with the Hippocratic Oath?
What oath? Wikipedia says:
In the 1970s, cultural and social forces induced many American medical schools to abandon the Hippocratic Oath as part of graduation ceremonies, usually substituting a version modified to something considered more politically up to date, or an alternate pledge like the Oath or Prayer of Maimonides.
A Catholic scholar details the Oath and its history here.
The Act is here; the government's own take on it is here.
We seem to be approaching a time when anybody except a criminal may be lawfully killed.
2 comments:
If I were in horrible nick, I'd want to be bumped off with a mass of morphine, not killed by hunger or thirst. Presumably the mass-of-morphine route really would be ruled out if they wanted my organs for transplants. So if "inertia harvesting" of organs is introduced, I shall opt out.
My mother told me that in rural areas, if a child was born deformed the doctor would "take care of it" and tell the mother it was a stillbirth; and the frail elderly in winter, when there was a shortage of food, might be pillowed.
A Welsh colleague once quoted me an old saying, "a cabbage has saved many a child and killed many another", i.e. one child would be fed and the other not, if a choice had to be made.
We feel these are horrid things, and rightly. Very hard choices had to be made in the old days, and it should cost a lot emotionally to break the taboo.
What's wrong today is this moral shiftiness, where we're being enouraged to kill the inconvenient and expensive dependent, but wish to disguise from ourselves what we're doing, so the killing is cruel and its description mealy-mouthed. And times are nothing like as hard as they were, either. I sometimes think the Nazis have won after all.
Post a Comment