ABSTRACT
Many guidelines have recently been published on the medical procedure that is now commonly called ‘palliative sedation’. I prefer, more precisely and less euphemistically, to speak of ‘sedation until death’: a policy of lowering the consciousness of the patient that is meant to go on until he dies. The doctor involved often decides to abstain from artificially administering fluids. For this combined procedure the guidelines require that the patient should not have a life expectancy beyond a stipulated maximum of days (4–14). The reason obviously is that in case of a longer life expectancy the patient may die from dehydration rather than from his lethal illness.
But, remarkably, not one of the guidelines tells us how we should classify the combined procedure in case of a longer life expectancy. Many arguments have been advanced in the literature why we shouldn't consider it to be a form of homicide or attempted homicide. In this chapter I argue that all these arguments, taken separately or jointly, are fallacious. When an action (deep sedation) foreseeably disables a person to block the life-shortening effects of an omission (failing to administer fluids), the action and the omission together should be acknowledged to kill her.
