Court limits the power of “living wills”
VANCOUVER, BC—Pro-life physician Will Johnston says the “clear victory” in a case involving an Alzheimer’s patient’s end-of-life wishes underscores the right of even the severely disabled to change their minds about when they wish to die.
“There’s a tendency for all of us to say reflexively, ‘If I ever get like that, shoot me,’” says Johnston, who chairs the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition of B.C. “All that really means is, ‘I have a horror of that degree of disability.’ What our actual experience will be of it is an entirely separate matter.”
Margot Bentley, who is 82, is in an advanced stage of Alzheimer’s disease. She has almost no control over her bodily functions, including the ability to feed herself. Every day, an attendant at the seniors’ care home in Abbotsford where she lives spoon-feeds her—over the objections of her family who say this violates the living will she wrote in 1991.
Bentley had asked that she receive “no nourishment or liquids” if she ever reached this degree of infirmity with no hope of recovery. As a nurse, she had seen first-hand the plight of dementia patients, and preferred death for herself to lingering in such a state.
When the care home said it could not legally comply with this request, the family asked the courts to back them up. They argued that the spoon-feeding constitutes medical care that she is receiving against her will.
But B.C. Supreme Court Justice Bruce Greyell disagreed. He ruled in early February the fact that Bentley accepts being spoon-fed proves “her consent through her behaviour.” He also rejected the claim she is only acting reflexively when she receives and eats her food.
Wanda Morris, executive director of Dying With Dignity, calls the ruling a “tragedy.”
“[Margot] was always so clear that she didn’t want to live this way,” says Morris in a statement. “That she is indeed living this way and may now continue to do so for years into the future is indeed a tragedy.”
But Johnston says this sort of attitude presumes that people with significant disabilities are suffering so terribly that they would welcome death. “This is a profound and deep prejudice in our society,” he says.
“We don’t know what experiences Margot Bentley is having, because she’s lost the ability to talk about them. But it doesn’t mean that her experiences are worthless to her, and it doesn’t mean that we should be striving to end them.”
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