Why the Supreme Court’s ruling on vegetative patients worries me

The Supreme Court ruling yesterday that a man in a vegetative state could have his feeding and hydration tubes removed so as to bring about his death was, obviously, redundant in his case. The man concerned, a banker in his fifties, is already dead – having earlier suffered a heart attack which left him brain damaged – but the wheels of justice ground inexorably on anyway. But the striking thing about the ruling, delivered by Lady Black, that food and hydration can be withdrawn from a patient in a persistent vegetative state, PVS, without the consent of the Court of Protection, is that we have absolutely no idea how many people it could apply to in the future. Could be 3,000 at any one time; could be more. We just don’t know.

The other aspect is that PVS isn’t an unambiguous thing, like being pregnant; in a very few cases, people recover and the diagnosis isn’t always absolute.