SA Woman Gets The Right To Die

SA woman gets the right to die, June 18, 2010.

A South Australian court ruling that refusing food, water and medication is not suicide has correctly interpreted a woman's right to die, a voluntary euthanasia group says.

But the decision by Supreme Court Justice Chris Kourakis highlights the fact that people with unrelievable and unbearable suffering have few options but to starve and dehydrate, the SA Voluntary Euthanasia Society (SAVES) says.

Justice Kourakis on Thursday said a competent adult was not under a duty to take life-sustaining medication and a refusal to do so was therefore not suicide.

"Once that proposition is accepted it is difficult to maintain the proposition that self starvation is suicide as a matter of logic or by reference to consistent ethical principles," he said.

The decision paves the way for SA woman's carers to follow the wishes the patient whose condition has deteriorated and who spends all her waking .

hours in a wheelchair and is unable to move or change position in bed

She wants to end her life by ceasing to take any food, water and insulin.

"She wrote of a despair which she could no longer endure," the judge says in his reasons.

He made orders that the hospital was under no lawful justification to feed, provide nutrition or administer medication or water to her even if there are likely to be consequences to her life or health.

SAVES president Frances Coombe applauded the decision that will ensure her carers were not prosecuted for complying with her wishes.

But she said people should not have to end their lives by starving if they were in unbearable pain.

"A person should be allowed the choice of a quick and peaceful death through legal voluntary euthanasia," she said in a statement on Friday.

By Liza Kappelle, AAP, via Sydney Morning Herald