Stretching the law

The Virgina Supreme Court last week raised disturbing questions in a right-to-die case while trying to will the law to say what it does not. The decision mirrors the public’s conflicting emotions to this difficult subject.

The court Friday rejected an appeal from Gov. Jim Gilmore to reinsert a feeding tube that had sustained a brain-damaged man for 3 1/2 years. The court concluded that withholding nutrition from the man merely permits the natural process of dying and should not be considered mercy killing, which is illegal under that state’s law.

Right-to-die laws are being debated nationwide, including in Maine, where a sensitive, conservative proposal in the Legislature last year should have won far more support than it did. The Virginia patient, Hugh Finn, reportedly ruptured his aorta in a March 1995 traffic accident, which deprived his brain of oxygen and left him unable to eat, care for himself or communicate. His wife testified that Mr. Finn earlier had told her he would never want to live in such a condition. She sought to remove the tube. Her decision was perhaps justified and certainly agonizing.

It was also in conflict with Virginia law, and the governor was correct to argue that, “the manifest purpose and effect of denying him food and water is to initiate a dying process not previously present.”

To come to the conclusion reached by the Virginia court is to make a distinction between a medical treatment of ommission (removing the tube) vs. one of commission (administering a pill) to end a life. The court would not conclude it “natural” if a doctor were to remove a tube delivering a life-saving drug and the patient died.

The court stretched the limits of the law because the law has not kept pace with the state of medicine. Bodies can be kept “alive” in ways lawmakers never imagined when they crafted prohibitions on mercy killing. In Virginia, as in Maine, it is past time for those laws to be reviewed.