Court Opinion

ID: 9732745
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 16:33:36.025167+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:26:32.538078
License: Public Domain

Nolan, J.
(dissenting). The court today has rendered an opinion which affronts logic, ethics, and the dignity of the human person.
As to logic, the court has built its entire case on an outrageously erroneous premise, i.e., food and liquids are medical treatment. The issue is not whether the tube should be inserted but whether food should be given through the tube. The process of feeding is simply not medical treatment and is not invasive, as that word is used in this context. Food and water are basic human needs. They are not medicines and feeding them to a patient is just not medical treatment. Because of this faulty premise, the court’s conclusions must inevitably fall under the weight of logic.
In the forum of ethics, despite the opinion’s high-blown language to the contrary, the court today has indorsed euthanasia and suicide. Suicide is direct self-destruction and is intrinsically evil. No set of circumstances can make it moral. Paul Brophy will die as a direct result of the cessation of feeding. The ethical principle of double effect is totally inapplicable here. This death by dehydration and starvation has been approved by the court. He will not die from the aneurysm which precipitated loss of consciousness, the surgery which was performed, the brain damage that followed or the insertion of the G-tube. He will die as a direct result of the refusal to feed him. He will starve to death, and the court approves this death. See Bannon, Rx: Death by Dehydration, 12 Human Life Rev., 70 (No. 3, 1986).
*443I pass over the glaring weakness in the evidentiary basis for the finding that Paul Brophy would decline provisions for food and water. The evidence that he knew the horrors of such a death is not present in this case, and without such evidence it can be argued persuasively that Brophy never made a judgment that food and water should be denied him.
Finally, I can think of nothing more degrading to the human person than the balance which the court struck today in favor of death and against life. It is but another triumph for the forces of secular humanism (modem paganism) which have now succeeded in imposing their anti-life principles at both ends of life’s spectrum. Pro dolor.