Jan 5 2010
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has directed Catholic hospitals to give food, water and medicine to comatose patients even when there is little hope of recovery, The San Francisco Chronicle reports.
The bishops "issued the directive Nov. 17 to the more than 1,000 church-affiliated hospitals and nursing homes in the United States and to all Catholic doctors and nurses. Invoking a 2004 speech by Pope John Paul II, the bishops said Catholics must provide nutritional assistance to patients with 'presumably irreversible conditions ... who can reasonably be expected to live indefinitely if given such care.'" The move comes as the conference continues also lobbies for tighter restrictions on abortion funding in health reform legislation in Congress (Egelko, 1/3).
 This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
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