http://www.tbilaw.com/blog Attorney Gordon Johnson Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:20:11 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 http://www.tbilaw.com/blog/2008/12/seoul-hospital-refuses-to-end-coma-patients-life.html http://www.tbilaw.com/blog/2008/12/seoul-hospital-refuses-to-end-coma-patients-life.html#comments Tue, 16 Dec 2008 22:06:00 +0000 Gordon Johnson http://www.tbilaw.com/blog/2008/12/seoul-hospital-refuses-to-end-coma-patients-life.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A South Korean hospital said Wednesday it will appeal a court order to let a comatose patient die by removing her from a respirator, saying the case could prompt a trend in devaluing human life.

The order issued by the Seoul Western District Court last month was for Severance Hospital in Seoul to end the life of a 76-year-old patient, citing the people’s right to die with dignity.

The decision — the first court ruling of its kind in South Korea — was issued after the patient’s children filed a lawsuit following the hospital’s refusal to end the women’s life.

Severance Hospital announced Wednesday that it cannot accept the court’s ruling because it could lead to a social trend to take human life too lightly.

“We should make decisions carefully on matters of human life,” hospital spokesman Lee Sung-man said.

Lee said the hospital plans to appeal the ruling directly to the Supreme Court and skip an appellate court because the issue needs to be settled as soon as possible.

The hospital will first need the patient’s family — the plaintiffs in the case — to agree to the streamlined process, and if they refuse the hospital will appeal the case to an ordinary appellate court.

The patient’s children have said their mother had always opposed keeping people alive on machines when there is no chance of revival.

The patient, only identified by her family name Kim, has been in a vegetative coma since suffering brain damage in February. The Seoul district court said in a ruling that doctors at major Seoul hospitals agreed that she has no chance of revival and could live as long as three or four months.

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By ARIEL DAVID
Associated Press Writer

ROME (AP) _ Italy’s highest court ruled Thursday in favor of a man’s request to disconnect his daughter’s feeding tube and allow her to die after 16 years in a vegetative state.

Courts, politicians and the Vatican have weighed in on the fate of Eluana Englaro, who fell into a vegetative state following a car accident in 1992, when she was 20.

The Court of Cassation said it had rejected an appeal by prosecutors against a lower court ruling in July in favor of Beppino Englaro. The father had said his daughter visited a friend in a coma shortly before her accident and expressed the will to refuse treatment in the same situation.

Italy does not allow euthanasia using methods such as fatal doses of drugs. Patients have a right to refuse treatment, but no law allows them to have a living will in case they become unconscious.

Beppino Englaro had fought a decade-long court battle to disconnect his daughter’s feeding tube.

The decision “confirms that we live under the rule of law,” he was quoted as saying by the ANSA news agency.

Catholic and anti-euthanasia groups had protested the ruling by the lower court in Milan in front of the city’s Duomo.

Conservative politicians reacted angrily to Thursday’s ruling, saying that the courts had overstepped their bounds. Enrico La Loggia, a lawmaker in Permier Silvio Berlusconi’s party, likened the decision to a “death sentence.”

The Vatican’s top health official, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, was quoted by the Apcom agency as saying that disconnecting a feeding tube amounts to “killing a person.”

Eluana Englaro has been kept in a hospital and fed artificially in the northern city of Lecco. Doctors have called her condition irreversible.

Her case has evoked comparisons to that of Terry Schiavo, the American woman at the center of a right-to-die debate until her death in 2005. Schiavo was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state after her heart stopped in 1990.

Schiavo’s husband, who wanted her feeding tube removed against her parents’ wishes, prevailed in a polarizing battle in the United States that reached Congress, President Bush and the Supreme Court.

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