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Freedom of conscience in a Catholic hospital

By Alliance Alert

Susan Jacoby writing at Big Questions Online: "[My mother] has explicitly told my brother and me, who have the legal power to make her health-care decisions if she is no longer able to do so, that she wants nothing done to keep her alive if her mind is gone. You can?t get much clearer than that. ... The bishops? most recent health-care directives, issued near the end of 2009, make it clear that they consider it the duty of Catholic health-care providers to impose artificial nutrition and hydration on patients in persistent vegetative states. My brother and I would, of course, take immediate steps to have our mother removed from a setting where her wishes would be ignored. But what if she had no living children or, like some two-thirds of Americans, had procrastinated about putting her instructions in writing?"

Full post as published by Constitutionally Correct on July 22, 2010 (boomark / email).