The family court rejected a hospital's request to perform emergency medical activity on the patient, and to honor her explicit request not to live as a caregiver or be hooked up to ventilators. As a result, after the procedure was not performed, she passed away unconnected to the devices, as she requested while she was still conscious and as her family explicitly clarified.
This is a 55-year-old woman with muscular dystrophy, who was hospitalized in the general intensive care unit after undergoing surgery. After the operation, she was anesthetized and ventilated, and since she could not breathe on her own, the doctors recommended performing a "tracheotomy" for further treatment and prolonged ventilation. Her guardian husband objected to signing his consent, arguing that, at his wife's request, he was not interested in "prolonging the existential suffering of dependence on others, and in a nursing situation that requires the use of artificial means in order to exist as a person."
Courtesy of News 13
The legal guardians, Adv. Avi Peretz and Adv. Ziv Yair – who were appointed by Legal Aid and represented the woman's wishes in court, and to the position of the Attorney General – argued that the respondent's wishes, as she expressed prior to the surgery, must be respected not to artificially prolong her life and to refrain from breathing and becoming nursing.
The court, as stated, rejected the hospital's request to perform the medical procedure, stating that "from the evidence presented, it was clearly proven that the guardian expresses the clear desire of the respondent not to undergo a tracheotomy. In this position, the guardian fulfills his duty set forth in the Legal Capacity and Guardianship Law, when he wishes to preserve her dignity to act in accordance with the preliminary instructions she gave, and expresses her will as expressed when she was able to understand the matter."
Summing up the decision, the court stated: "My heart is with the family who had to go to court during their difficult moments. I see great comfort in their steadfastness to serve as a mouthpiece for the wishes of the dear respondent, and to enable her to end her life with dignity."
Dr. Meital Segal-Reich, Director of Legal Capacity and Aging at the Ministry of Justice's Legal Aid: "This is a painful case that deals with the 'sanctity of the end of life' of a woman with multiple background diseases, who sought to avoid artificial life-prolonging treatments. We insisted on her clear desire to avoid the procedure, with the support of all her family members, and clarified her clear opinion despite the signing of the inappropriate power of attorney that no longer came into effect, and all this despite the fact that she gave her consent by signing the surgery itself, in the hope that it would improve her quality of life.
"The court accepted her request, as we represented when she was anesthetized and on a ventilator, and ordered her wishes to be fulfilled. Beyond the great importance of legal representation in similar situations, the case shows the need for further consideration in relation to the Dying Patient Law, and its applicability to a person's request to refrain from artificial life extension and connection to ventilators, and to feeding in other deteriorating terminal situations when there is no measured end-of-life assessment."
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