Thinking of the ANH [artificial nutrition and hydration] to PVS [permanent vegetative state] patients I just am grateful for the clear statement of the CDF [Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith] (link: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20070801_risposte-usa_en.html ) asserting the absolute obligation to give food and hydration to all people. (Although it leaves a little bit of question when says "...except when they cannot be assimilated by the patient’s body or cannot be administered to the patient without causing significant physical discomfort". One might wonder what significant physical discomfort means in concrete cases.) Trying to do otherwise than the absolute support of life and come up with different ethical guidelines seems to me that they bring us in a thick forest of irresolvable questions and mind-boggling subtleties of "when" "how" and "what". And nothing seems satisfactorily reassuring that such decisions would be ethically right.
I am convinced that God's will is hallmarked by simplicity and is elegant, while our constructions of mind can be very confusing. This gives me the criteria for discerning sometimes, as in this case. Supporting life unconditionally is simple, elegant and ethically right. Otherwise, as Viktor Frankl used the expression, we cannot make sure that the doctor who approaches our sickbed any time does not come as an executioner, but always to heal us. Really, I don't want the medical personnel be an arbiter about my life and death. Neither myself want to make this decision - although I don't wish to be kept alive ad infinitum by artificial extraordinary means (not food and water, but I think of other machines that can make the tissue of the body functioning, or of repeated medical procedures and medications). Let God be God and decide about the way and moment of dying, we must not hasten death in any way. For one thing we cannot be sure, what experiences the person is undergoing even in PVS, experiences that he/she needs and wants and are salvific for him/her.
Even in cases of suicide we do everything to bring back the person, although he/she clearly wanted to die (at least for that moment when tried to take away his/her life). First, we cannot be sure that the suicidal person (even if he/she is a terminally ill patient) does not reverse the decision and want to live as approaching death. Further, if God wants to end his/her life, this person will die notwithstanding our best efforts. On the other side - as a case I know of shows it - if God wants a person live for reasons he knows, he might even permit a miraculous recovery, even if the doctor took away the life support!
Said that about these particular cases of life and death I see also the difficulty of how to defend our position in a society that tends to think differently. How to act, besides supporting the position of the Church - which is part of our faith here, note that the referred statement is a "doctrinal" document, not a "disciplinary" one?
Besides, this question of ANH brings up the wider and maybe more pressing ethical problem of taking away food and water from perfectly healthy people, practically starving to death entire populations while our society suffers from the problems of obesity. The particular case of the PVS patients should shed clear light hat the moral obligation to support life is much wider than these cases and that of abortion and euthanasia. We take away life support by the injustice of abusing the resources, by greed, by our wasteful lifestyle that we support on the expenses of the poor of the world, and first of all by spending on machines of death and war, costly and dangerous weapon systems. This is an indirect way of taking away of other people's life that we don't realize normally in our everyday life, meanwhile wars taking away directly the life of a multitude of innocent people and that makes hard to justify morally any form of violent intervention.
