ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the interests and rights of those patients themselves but on the families, the friends and their health care providers, and what the experience with such a patient does to the grieving. It argues that grounds that although they may well be feeling no pain or discomfort they remain persons, and therefore continue to have interests and rights. Some are prepared to forego resuscitating persistent vegetative state patients who arrest, and to stop other therapeutic and life prolonging interventions which have become therapeutically useless, but only if such patients have clearly expressed such a wish in advance in a living will or to a family member or friend. Health care providers and patient families should become aware or be made aware that in a number of circumstances the law consider the cessation of life support, or resuscitating a patient, to be a form of killing or euthanasia.
