The is a moral obligation to provide nourishment to Terri Schiavo & others

LAST YEAR at this time, the Holy Father spoke out about this issue which has unfolded before us in a gruesome way this past week.

On March 20, speaking to participants in an international congress on the “vegetative” state, Pope John Paul II profoundly changed the worldwide debate on how to respond to this condition. He issued the first clear and explicit papal statement on the obligation to provide food and water for patients in a “persistent vegetative state” (PVS).

With the Pope’s statement, the Church’s teaching authority has rejected each aspect of the theory that opposes assisted feeding for patients in a PVS. The Pope’s speech marks a new chapter in the Catholic contribution to efforts against euthanasia by omission

For many years, and through many battles in courts and legislatures, pro-life groups have tried to ensure that these patients receive the food and fluids they need to survive. (Patients in the “vegetative” state have sleep/wake cycles and so are not comatose, but by definition they show no sign that they are aware of themselves or their surroundings.)

Leading the other side of the debate, of course, have been “right-to-die” groups who see such patients as better off dead (or sometimes see their families as better off if the patients are dead). Bioethicist Daniel Callahan warned in the Hastings Center Report in October 1983 that many of his colleagues favored broad policies for withdrawing feeding tubes not because of special burdens involved in such feeding, but because “a denial of nutrition may in the long run become the only effective way to make certain that a large number of biologically tenacious patients actually die.”

With the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous rejection of a constitutional “right” to assisted suicide in 1997, and the refusal of any state except Oregon to legalize that practice, the euthanasia debate has focused even more squarely on the removal of food and fluids.

More here.