(LifeNews.com) – On August 13, the Pontifical Academy for Life (PAL), headed by Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, released “Little Lexicon on End of Life,” which wrestles with various bioethical issues.
One particularly noteworthy issue is the necessity of providing patients in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) with food and hydration via feeding tubes. That the PAL felt the need to raise questions in the first place is troubling enough, but the documents unclear language also amplified confusion.
For example, it states that persons diagnosed as being in a PVS are victims “of a reductive conception of disease, which is understood as an alteration of a particular function of the organism, losing sight of the totality of the person,” and that “this reductive way of interpreting disease then leads to an equally reductive concept of care, which ends up focusing on individual functions of the organism rather than the overall good of the person.” CONTINUE