Tuesday, April 27, 2004
End of Life Issues
I commend to you Bishop Sgreccia's paper, The Subject in a Vegetative State: a Personalistic View, available from Zenit. Exploring the unitary nature of the human being (body and soul) from a Catholic theological anthropology and an ontologically based personalism, Bishop Sgreccia develops a criterion for determining when death occurs (thus allowing for transplants).
He concludes that a person in a persistent vegetative state cannot be considered dead. "[T]he difference between so-called cortical death and encephalic death is clear. In the first case the organism demonstrates the persistance of a unitary organic life, albeit of a vegetative kind -- it is able to breathe autonomously as well, it maintains cardio-circulatory activity, and it is able to be nourished if fed artificially. In the second case none of these funtions is carried out autonomously, respiratory activity is replaced by machines..."
Understanding these distinctions (and the Catholic position) is important for Catholics in the legal profession for both affirmative and defensive reasons. Affirmatively, proposing this anthropology is important in building a culture of life. Defensively, understanding these arguments will better equip us to protect the rights of conscience of health care workers when those rights are threatened by coercive legislation or hospital practice.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2004/04/end_of_life_iss.html