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16 Sing. L. Rev. 360 (1995)
To Treat or Not to Treat: Autonomy, Beneficence and the Sanctity of Life

handle is hein.journals/singlrev16 and id is 364 raw text is: To Treat or Not to Treat: Autonomy, Beneficence and the Sanctity of Life? JOHN KEOWN I. INTRODUCTION Should a baby born prematurely at 22 weeks gestation be rushed to the nearest neonatal intensive care unit? Should a 90 year-old patient with senile dementia who has just suffered a heart attack be resuscitated? Should antibiotics be administered to a patient in a persistent vegetative state (pvs)? The question whether or not to treat a patient can, as these cases illustrate, prove ethically and legally problematic, particularly at the beginning and end of life. Developments such as advances in medical technology which allow increasingly premature babies to be saved and the growing proportion of elderly patients in many countries serve only to highlight the growing importance of this question in medical practice. This paper cannot hope to explore and resolve all the complex- ities raised by treatment and non-treatment decisions, nor does it attempt to do so. Rather, it offers, in a simple but not simplistic way, an analysis which it is thought offers the best way of deciding John Keown, BA, MA (Cantab), DPhil (Oxon), Barrister-at-Law (MT) is a Visiting Fellow at National University of Singapore, Academic Year 1994-95.

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