What is the Catholic view on end-of-life palliative care and life support?
Robert Sungenis answers that the Church requires everything reasonable to be done to keep a person alive, with withdrawal of support only in extreme circumstances and, for Catholics, after consulting the Church. He notes that hard cases, where a patient is kept animated only by drugs, call for a judgment by someone with authority, since medicine is not a perfect science.
A viewer asks what the Church teaches about end-of-life palliative care.
Answer
The Church would say that everything that can reasonably be done to keep the person alive should be done, and only in extreme circumstances may you withdraw support, and if you are Catholic you would need to consult the Church before doing that. The standing rule is that you keep them alive as long as possible. The hard cases arise when the person would die immediately without the medicine, which raises the question of whether you are only artificially propping them up, like something kept animated by drugs alone. That is a judgment call for someone with authority, who has to weigh everything involved, because we have reached a point in medicine where we know enough about the body to make those judgments, though it is not a perfect science; people have woken up when we thought they were dead. At least we can talk about it responsibly.