Ruling has resonance in euthanasia debate

The United Kingdom Supreme Court has decided that doctors may withdraw treatment from patients in a persistent vegetative state without consulting the courts in every case – providing that both the medical team and the patient’s relatives are agreed that this withdrawal is in the patient’s best interests.

In the judgment the court is no longer asking whether it is lawful to withhold or withdraw the nourishment that’s keeping a patient alive, but whether it is lawful in some cases to supply it.

Campaigners against euthanasia claim the judgment could hasten the deaths of more than 20,000 people whose care currently costs the NHS £100,000 a year each. This figure assumes that in all those cases the relatives agree with the doctors that the patient’s best interests are not served by treatment. Even if that were the case, the only thing a recourse to the courts would do under the present law would be to delay, complicate, and make much more expensive a process that would inevitably reach the same conclusion.

This week’s judgment still – and rightly – reserves a decisive vote for the courts in cases where there is no agreement. Slippery-slope arguments have some force but this judgment comes with crampons. The really difficult steps will come if Parliament extends the law towards assisted dying for the fully conscious.