Reply #16: They're no different, not really [View All]

[Warpy]

One required artificial ventilation, and left to his own devices, he died. The other required artificial nutrition and hydration, and left to her own devices and without further interference with bodily processes, she will die. Neither had any hope of improvement in their physical condition (unlike healthy infants who require nutrition to be fed to them or men like Falwell who required temporary mechanical ventilation for a temporary illness).

The key here is "no improvement in condition." Left to their own devices, they are terminal. Artificially fed or ventilated, their condition was stable but with little quality of life in the present and less in the future.

My best guess on little Sun Hudson was that he'd have died even with mechanical ventilation in a period of weeks, if not days, as he put on weight and his oxygen demand grew but his ventilatory capacity did not. His life would have been short and increasingly miserable.

The people who are yelling that artifical nutrition and hydration is somehow different form artificial oxygenation are simply missing a point: artifical life support measures were never meant to be permanent means of keeping the nearly dead technically alive until some other disease process kills them, and it's a terrible misuse of decreasing Medicaid resources to do so, when those resources could be directed at saving people who have a hope of improvement.