The case of a nurse who has been in a vegetative state for 37 years prompted a landmark ruling yesterday that life support can be removed from some patients in India.
Although the country’s supreme court turned down an application to stop treating Aruna Shanbaug, who was brain damaged following a sexual attack at the Mumbai hospital where she worked in 1973, it opened the way for “passive euthanasia” in other, exceptional circumstances.
Withdrawing life support could be allowed under exceptional circumstances, provided the request was from family and supervised by doctors and the courts, a two-judge bench in the Supreme Court said.
“We agree ... that passive euthanasia should be permitted in our country in certain situations,” the court said in its ruling, adding that “we are laying down the law... until parliament makes a law on the subject”.
Fellow doctors and nurses at the hospital have been caring for Ms Shanbaug ever since the attack. The court ruled that her medical team, rather than a journalist and friend who had asked the court for permission to let her die, were her effective next of kin.