B.C. Alzheimer’s Patient Loses Right-to-die Appeal.

Doctor ASSISTED SUICIDE is now legal in Canada.

Yet.

Family members of an 83-year-old woman with late-stage Alzheimer’s disease have lost their latest legal challenge to force a care home to stop providing food to honour what they say were her last wishes. The lawyer representing the family says the decision strikes at the heart of ongoing debates about end-of-life care and patients’ decision-making rights. Margot Bentley’s family argued her care home’s decision to feed her violated a living will she wrote more than 20 years ago, which said she did not want to be kept alive artificially if her health deteriorated beyond the possibility of recovery.

The B.C. Court of Appeal released a ”unanimous ruling” Tuesday that concluded caregivers at the Maplewood Home in Abbotsford, B.C., were not feeding Bentley against her will and that care could continue. Court documents reveal that as a nurse, Bentley had seen patients in vegetative states due to Alzheimer’s disease and/or other common forms of dementia; and told her family not to allow the same to happen to her. Somehow, it seems Justice Mary Newbury in her unanimous reading concluded that despite being unable to speak or recognize family members, Bentley is still capable of deciding whether to accept or refuse what she’s being given to eat and drink.

“I recognize the terribly difficult situation in which Mrs. Bentley’s family find themselves and I appreciate the disappointment they must feel in being unable to comply with what they believe to have been her wishes and what they believe still to be her wishes,” Newbury wrote for the three-judge Appeal Court panel. “It is a grave thing, however, to ask or instruct caregivers to stand by and watch a patient starve to death.” [Non Intervention, as it was called, when I worked in nursing at the Royal Alexandra Hospital Edmonton Alberta; required the signatures of two doctors. This Right to die with dignity method did not require that religious patients opt to pay for doctor assisted SUICIDE. Starvation is also painless.]

Kieran Bridge, a veteran health lawyer who took the family’s case pro bono in 2013, said in an interview, “She doesn’t communicate in any way. … She sits with her eyes closed and curled up in a foetal position with stiff muscles and her hands in a claw-like position. Caregivers attempt to feed Bentley by “prodding” her with a spoon, sometimes repeatedly, until she opens her mouth. Kieran Bridge described the treatment as battery, defined as unlawful and unprompted forceful physical contact.

The Appeal Court dismissed that description, accepting evidence that care home workers would not force her to accept either food or drink if Bentley kept her mouth closed. [However as any mother, or nurse well knows, opening the mouth is an instinctive, almost reflex action to “prodding” in the mouth area.] The Appeal Court dismissed that description, accepting evidence that care home workers would not force her to accept either food or drink if Bentley kept her mouth closed.

Could it possibly be, do you think, that the greatest motivating factors for this decision was that if non-intervention were allowed; doctors and hospitals could not charge the family for “ELECTIVE TREATMENT”?