Life support on a timer?

Bartley Kulp suggested Rabbis:New Life support tech 'murder' in JPost

To Rabbi Eidenson, this is a an article that is rife with halachic, hashgafic and political issues.

A technology soon to be introduced in local hospitals that automatically turns off life-support systems at the request of terminally ill patients has been denounced by a prominent group of rabbis as a desecration of God's name. 'Timer ventilator' allows patients the choice to have their life support cut off automatically. The technology is "tantamount to murder," according to the rabbis, who are aligned with the Ashkenazi haredi community's most respected living halachic authority, Rabbi Yosef Shalom Elyashiv.

"If the Health Ministry goes ahead with its plans to implement a technology that shortens the lives of terminally ill patients, the nations of the world will say that Judaism condones transgressing one of the Ten Commandments - Thou Shalt not Kill," Rabbi Ya'acov Weiner said last week. "That would be a terrible desecration of God's name."

Weiner, who heads the Jerusalem Center for Research, Medicine and Halacha, made the comments at a conference on Jewish medical ethics, organized by the center for the past 11 years, that brings together religious doctors and Halacha experts. Weiner and other rabbis who spoke at the conference, including a senior representative of Elyashiv, said the Terminally Ill Patient Law, approved by the Knesset in 2006, contradicted Jewish law.

They specifically targeted a technology condoned in the new law that allows a terminally ill patient to choose to be connected to a ventilator that is automatically turned off by a timer at a future date. The timer ventilator, which is in its last stages of development, will be introduced in hospitals in coming months. Meanwhile, proponents of the "timer ventilator," including many Orthodox rabbis and doctors, argue that while Jewish law prohibits pulling the plug, it permits refraining from reactivating the ventilator once it has automatically been turned off by the timer.

However, organizers of the conference said that "greatest rabbis of the generation" reject the use of the "timer ventilator." They said that in addition to Elyashiv, other prominent halachic authorities also opposed it, including Rabbi Moshe Sternbach of the Edah Haredit and Rabbi Zalman Nechemia Goldberg of the High Rabbinic Court. Rabbi Yehoshua Neuwirth, an author of a definitive book on the laws of Shabbat called Shmirat Shabbat K'hilchata (Observing Shabbat's Laws), told a contingent from the conference who visited his home on Tuesday that use of the "timer ventilator" was "murder," organizers said. [...]

Conspicuously absent from the conference, which took place in Jerusalem's Bayit Vagan neighborhood, were rabbis and religious doctors who support the use of the timer ventilator and had backed the Terminally Ill Patient Law.

Dr. Rabbi Mordechai Halperin, who was a member of the Steinberg Multi-Disciplinary Health Ministry committee that helped prepare the legislation, said many prominent rabbis supported the use of such ventilators. The committee was headed by Prof. Avraham Steinberg, a neurologist and halachic expert. "Many halachic authorities permit the use of the timer on condition that it is activated before the terminally ill patient is initially connected," Halperin said. "Once the patient is hooked up to a ventilator without a timer it is forbidden to activate a timer. In the legislation it is specifically stated that doing so would be a punishable offense. "The other conditions for allowing the use of the timer are that the patient is in severe pain and that he expressly asks for the option of using the timer," he said. The spring issue of Asia, a journal of Jewish medical ethics, features letters from two prominent rabbis supporting the use of the timer ventilator. One of the letters is from Rabbi Avigdor Nebenzahl, former rabbi of the Old City of Jerusalem. The other letter is from the same Neuwirth whom the conference organizers had claimed was adamantly opposed to the use of the timer ventilator. [...]