WHY THE NEED FOR A "WILL TO LIVE"?

I've heard about a number of other documents you can sign to say you want lifesaving medical treatment. Is there any particular reason I should sign the Will to Live developed by NRLC?

While written with the best of intentions, some of the other documents are unfortunately insufficiently protective. Often, that is because they are written in a way that tries to set out general ethical principles rather than the sort of very specific directions that are essential in a legal document.

An analogy may help to make this clear. Some ethical or religious systems hold that an employer has the duty to give an employee a "just wage." This is fully appropriate as an ethical principle. But what would be the effect of a legal contract that, instead of setting out a specific dollar amount, simply stated that the employee would get a "just wage"? From a legal perspective, the term is so vague that it would be quite unenforceable. What wage the employer would claim was "just" might be far less than what the employee expected to be covered by the term.

The same problem arises here. A widely accepted ethical/religious perspective holds that "ordinary" treatment ought always to be given, but "extraordinary" treatment is optional. The difficulty with using such language in a legal document, however, is that it is open to such a variety of interpretations that an effort to enforce it meaningfully in any concrete context would be useless. For example, there are a number of theologians and ethicists who argue that food and water are "extraordinary" whenever patients have certain disabilities. It would therefore be impossible to rely on such language in court to prevent a patient's starvation or dehydration. Of course, such a document could go on to specify that food and water should always be given. But that would still leave uncertain what particular medical treatment was required or rejected by the document.

That is why the Will to Live is careful to be very precise and specific, and why the suggestions that accompany it urge each signer to be equally careful in describing any treatment that is to be foregone under any "Special Conditions."

The right to life movement used to oppose living will legislation on the grounds, among others, that living wills are unnecessary - - that patients, families, and doctors can make appropriate decisions without them. So why do we need a document like the Will to Live?

When living will bills were first proposed in the 1970s and 1980s, the general consensus and the normal practice of medicine favored life. Food and fluids were almost always provided patients as a matter of course, and lifesaving medical treatment was normally provided unless patients were truly terminally ill and in the final stage of the dying process. Pro-life groups pointed out that living wills were unnecessary to prevent "overtreatment" in the form of medical technology that merely prolonged the dying process, both because the accepted standards of medical practice did not ...