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South Korean Court Orders Removal of Life Support from Comatose Woman

By Thaddeus M. Baklinski

SEOUL, South Korea, December 1, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A ruling by the Seoul Western District Court ordering doctors to remove life support, including feeding tubes, from a comatose woman has ignited controversy in Korea over whether the ruling will lead to assisted suicide and euthanasia.

This ruling is reportedly the first of its kind in Korea, where current law bans any form of assisted suicide. According to The Korea Times, in a similar 1997 case a family was convicted of murder for having assisted in the removal of a ventilator from a patient.

The case involves a 75-year-old woman, identified as Kim Ok-kyung, who fell into what has been reported as both a "coma" and a "persistent vegitative state" in February while undergoing a lung examination. The patient’s family filed a court request in May asking the hospital to take the woman off life-support, claiming that extending Kim's life using medical devices would prolong her "painful and meaningless" existence. The Seoul Western District court accepted the request to halt treatment, ordering the removal of feeding and ventilator tubes on Friday.

Judge Kim Cheon-soo stressed that the decision should not be seen as a blanket approval for euthanasia, but is confined only to those for whom medical treatment has no impact.

"The patient can ask doctors to remove life support if it causes physical and mental pain and hurts human dignity and personality. Considering her hopeless state, the expected years left in her life and her age, the patient is assumed to have expressed her wish to die a natural death with the life support removed," Cheon-soo said in his ruling, adding that, "Doctors from Seoul National University Hospital and Asan Medical Center have confirmed that she is expected to survive up to three or four months at best. In this condition, further treatment is meaningless.''

Park Jung-woo, secretary-general of the Archdiocese of Seoul Life and Ethics Committee said in a Korea Times report, "Patients should receive the best care possible, but how one accepts death is also important when there's no chance of recovery. A patient choosing to withdraw his own treatment is one thing, but removing treatment from someone else is different."

Alex Schadenberg of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition told LifeSiteNews that there is a significant and profound difference between removal of a respirator, which would allow natural death to follow, and removal of a feeding tube which would cause death by dehydration and is therefore active euthanasia.

"The decision from the Seoul Western District Court is concerning because it means that they have now authorised the decision to enable physicians to intentionally dehydrate their patients to death. When we intentionally dehydrate a person to death who is not otherwise dying, the intent of the omission is to deliberately cause the death of the person, which is euthanasia," Schadenberg said.

"The court should have limited its judgment to the withdrawal of the ventilator," Schadenberg explained. "When a ventilator is withdrawn, the death that might occur is not caused by the removal of the ventilator, but rather by the (pre-existing) medical condition."

According to many ethical experts assisted ventilation can be considered “extraordinary” treatment, and therefore can be licit to refuse or remove, in certain circumstances. The provision of food and hydration, on the other hand, is merely “ordinary” treatment and cannot legitimately be withdrawn.

"We must remember that when we allow one person in society to intentionally cause the death of another person in society, it is impossible to provide safeguards that will protect people who are vulnerable, depressed or socially devalued," Schadenberg warned. "We must strive for a culture that cares and not kills its vulnerable citizens."

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