SEVERAL Australian Catholic bioethicists participated in a contentious debate at a Vatican conference on when to withdraw nutrition from patients in a persistent vegetative state.
Among them were director of Melbourne’s Caroline Chisholm Centre for Health Ethics, Divine Word Missionary Father Norman Ford and independent consultant ethicist Nicholas Tonti-Filippini of Melbourne, who chairs the Research Committee for Matercare International.
Last month’s four-day conference ‘Life-Sustaining Treatments and Vegetative State: Scientific Advances and Ethical Dilemmas’ was organised by the World Federation of Catholic Medical Associations and the Pontifical Academy for Life.
The conference showed a lack of consensus among bioethicists on when to withdraw nutrition.
Fr Ford said there was no universal agreement among Catholic moralists that there is a duty to continue medically assisted nutrition and hydration (MANH) for patients who have been certainly diagnosed as permanently unconscious due to an irreversible pathological condition.
Mr Tonti-Filippini focused on a Victorian Supreme Court case last year involving a decision by the Public Advocate and a tribunal to allow a patient’s husband to withdraw feeding through a percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG feeding). The case involved following the previously expressed wishes of the patient.
Melbourne archdiocese argued against withholding sustenance.
Pope John Paul II told the conference that the removal of feeding tubes from people in vegetative states was immoral.
He said no judgment on the quality of life of such patients could justify such ‘euthanasia by omission’.
