Amid the national crush to fill out living wills in the wake of the Terri Schiavo saga, a California pro-life group is warning citizens against signing that state’s standard living will form, claiming it could result in a painful death by starvation and dehydration.
Campaign for Children and Families, a family-values nonprofit organization, is urging people to avoid using California’s Advance Health Care Directive form because it makes no distinction between food and water versus heart-and-lung machinery and other artificial life-support systems. Californians who use the state’s form with its standard check-off boxes may be denied nutrition and hydration, says the CCF, and could end up dying of thirst and hunger if they fall into a coma or become otherwise incapacitated.
The state’s Advance Health Care Directive is found in the California Probate Code, Section 4701.
“California’s living will law assumes you want to be starved or dehydrated to death,” said CCF President Randy Thomasson. “This is frightening. Most people don’t know that signing the standard advance directive form could sentence you to a horrible death, by your own hand or someone else’s.” The California’s standard form provides space for citizens to further specify their wishes, but without the extra input, the form defaults in the direction of equating nutrition and hydration with artificial life-support machinery.
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