AUSTRALIA CASE TO DECIDE IF LIFE SUPPORT TO BE PULLED ON WOMAN

MELBOURNE, May 15, 2003 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Australian officials will soon ask the country’s Supreme Court to rule “on whether a woman’s tube-feeding and hydration should be removed,” writes Archbishop Denis Hart, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, in an article for The Age newspaper.  The case will set an “important precedent for court-made law,” writes Hart, and “may change the way we care for and relate to elderly, handicapped and unconscious people for years to come.” Hart says the Catholic Church “rejects two extremes. First, the attitude of ‘feed people up no matter what’ and second, the attitude that ‘they’re better off dead, so why continue feeding?’”  But he warns, “The more vulnerable people are, the more vigilantly we must protect them and ensure that they receive appropriate care. … Good medical and nursing ethics have always insisted that we may never deliberately hasten death. We all know that that can be done by withholding basic needs, as easily as by giving them poison. We can kill by neglect.” According to Canadian groups like the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, starving patients to death is increasingly the method of choice.  For the full article from The Age:  https://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/05/13/1052591791871.html