British Court Rules That Competent & Conscious Patient Can Be Denied Life-Sustaining Treatment Against Her Will
British doctors are seeking to take a 19-year-old critically ill female patient off the intensive care despite her objections and those of her parents.
Unlike most such cases, the woman known only as “ST” is conscious and communicative.
Yet, the doctors argue that she is not being realistic about her chances of survival from a rare disorder.
Now a British court has agreed and ordered that she can be placed on end-of-life care against her will.
ST is suffering from a rare genetic mitochondrial disease that is progressively degenerative. The case has similarities to that of Charlie Gard, an infant who was removed from life support at the insistence of doctors despite objections from the parents. The Gard family was seeking to take Charlie to the United States for experimental treatment.
ST has been in the ICU for the past year, requiring a ventilator and a feeding tube. She also requires regular dialysis due to chronic kidney damage from her disease.
She wants to be allowed to travel to Canada for an experimental treatment but the doctors oppose the plan and say that she is not accepting the realities of her terminal illness.
They say that she is “actively dying” without any hope of resuming life outside of intensive care.
Her deeply religious family have spent their entire life savings on her care and has complained that a “transparency order” requested by the hospital barred their ability to give details on the case to help raise public funds.
What is so remarkable about this case is that it is not an infant or a comatose patient.
The court found that ST “is able to communicate reasonably well with her doctors with assistance from her mother and, on occasion, speech therapists.”
Moreover, two psychiatrists testified that she is mentally competent to make decisions about her own care.
Nevertheless, the judge found that she is mentally incapable of making decisions for herself because “she does not believe the information she has been given by her doctors.”
The court appears to reject her ability to make this decision because she is making the wrong decision.
Accordingly, the court ruled that decisions about ST’s further care should be determined by the Court of Protection based on an assessment of her best interests. Her “best interest,” according to the doctors, is to die.
Thus, the courts have declared that ST cannot choose to continue life-extending treatment and can be forced into palliative care against her will.
The logic of the decision is chilling.
The court is told that ST has cognitive and communicative abilities to make such decisions. However, because the court disagrees with her desire to continue to fight to live, she is treated as effectively incompetent.
