Mubarak, who Egyptian state security said had a stroke, is in a coma in a military hospital, transferred there from a Cairo prison hospital. Dying? Maybe but not yet. Sharon has been on life support in a deep coma since he was felled by a massive stroke in 2006.
If you go by what their religions teach, is ongoing life support required in these situations? Yes, and no.
Dr. Abdulaziz Sachedina, professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Virginia and an expert on Islamic bioethics, writes on his website about the use of life support:
The purpose of extraordinary medical intervention is to maintain the process of life, not to avoid or postpone death. It is forbidden to cause harm to the patient with equipment and drugs when the futility of such procedures is established by medical team. Under those circumstances it is permissible to unplug life-support systems.
Doctors and family, Sachedina writes, must consider the prospect that the patient will regain essential functions of life including...
... a person's ability to make decisions and execute them through his own conscious and cognitive competence.
... If active medical intervention in the case of a severely brain-damaged patient leads to further suffering of the patient and those related to him in society, then the ethical judgement cannot ignore the ensuing general harm, including the rising cost of prolonging such life for the entire society.
Islamic jurists have made clear, he writes, that
... in the eyes of Muslim public it is pointless and even degrading to intervene medically in the nature's course toward an imminent death.
Jewish teaching on death and dying is very similar: Choose life when it can be chosen but do not prolong dying.
The situations where the use of life support causes the most trouble are those where the patient has become reliant on the machinery, such that if the machine were turned off, the patient would probably not begin to breathe unaided. Some authorities subscribe to the idea that prolonging this state of supported life when there is no hope of a cure is not the same as attempting to save a life, and so need not be done. However, it is likely that each case will have to be treated on its own merits according to the beliefs of the patient concerned and the wishes of their family.
Sharon's sons will hear nothing of letting go. In a book about his father's life, Gilad Sharon wrote that, according to the New York Times,
... doctors and nurses urged the family to let Mr. Sharon die after his stroke in January 2006 because, as it paraphrases one doctor as saying, "Based on the CT scan, the game was over." The Sharon brothers would not hear of it and insisted on an operation and other efforts to keep their father alive.
Sharon wrote...
The CT scan had been misread. Doctors acknowledged after the operation that his father was healthier than they had realized
He told the Times last year in a phone interview,
When (his father) is awake, he looks at me and moves fingers when I ask him to. I am sure he hears me.
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