Published on August 8th, the Vatican’s Academy for Life has published a “Small Lexicon on End of Life” covering a range of bioethical issues, including the provision of food and hydration for patients.
While the Church’s stance against assisted dying remains steadfast, there is a new openness to allowing doctors to withhold “aggressive therapy” which includes administering food and hydration to patients in a vegetative state.
The volume noted that the food and hydration prepared for vegetative patients are prepared in a laboratory and administered through technology, and thus do not amount to “simple care procedures”. According to the text, doctors are “required to respect the will of the patient who refuses them with a conscious and informed decision, even expressed in advance in anticipation of the possible loss of the ability express oneself and choose”. This would suggest that Catholic patients are allowed to choose for an advance request to refuse life-sustenance should they end up in a vegetative state.
In compiling this stance, the text refers to the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), Dignitas Infinita, which reiterates the need to avoid “every aggressive therapy or disproportionate intervention” in the treatment of patients with serious illnesses. It also refers to the July 2020 letter Samaritanus Bonus, which expressed “the moral obligation to exclude aggressive therapy” treatment plans.
This position marks a shift toward a new openness since the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2007 in response to clarification on the moral obligation to provide food and water to patients in a vegetative state, even through artificial means. The position at the time was that even in a situation where there’s moral certainty that a patient will never recover, it was not permissible to withdraw food and water, as doing so would effectively allow the person to die of dehydration or starvation.