Incompetent and burdensome -- kill him!

This is really scary. In the Terry Schaivo case medical authorities at least were able to claim that they were executing her wishes as expressed by her husband when they killed her. But a recent legal ruling in Britain takes things to a whole new level.

CNS News reports:

An appeal court has denied a terminally ill British man the assurance that his wish not to be starved to death once he becomes incapacitated will be respected to the end.

Former mailman Leslie Burke, 45, has a progressively degenerative disease that although leaving him fully conscious, will eventually rob him of the ability to swallow and communicate.

He petitioned the High Court last year to ensure that he would not be denied food and water once he was no longer able to articulate his wishes.

Burke won that right when judge James Munby ruled that if a patient was mentally competent -- or if incapacitated, had made an advance request for treatment -- then doctors were bound to provide artificial nutrition or hydration (ANH).

But last May, the General Medical Council (GMC) -- the medical licensing authority -- took the case to the Appeal Court, arguing that doctors had been placed "in an impossibly difficult position."

The appeal judges have now agreed, overturning the High Court judgment and upholding GMC guidelines on how to treat incapacitated patients.

Those guidelines give doctors the final say in whether a patient should be given life-sustaining "treatment," a term legally defined to include artificial feeding or hydration.

The latest ruling obliges doctors to provide life-prolonging treatment if a terminally ill and mentally competent patient asks for it.

However, once a patient is no longer able to express his or her wishes or is mentally incapacitated, doctors can withdraw treatment, including ANH, if they consider it to be causing suffering or "overly burdensome." [Emphasis mine]

Read it here.

That's right. Even if you have expressly stated that you wanted life-sustaining treatment continued and had done so in a court proceeding, "medical authorities" can still kill you if they think that your treatment is "burdensome."

I know a lot of medical authorities and I damn well wouldn't trust them to decide whether I was to live or die.

We're not far here from the Monty Python skit in which a team of surgeons comes to a perfectly healthy man's house to collect his organs because he had signed an organ donor's card. [Sorry sir, we need your liver now.]

Frightening, and more than a little disgusting!

Remember at least three of the sitting justices on the Supreme Court feel that it is quite all right to take guidance on difficult decisions from foreign precedents.