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.