I think you're playing God anyway. Someone chose to place the feeding tube, perhaps the person or people placed one with the hope that it would come back and get through. When that didn't happen, they decided to let her pass. Do we know if he had already decided to accept treatment of this type? This is a circumstance where, if the patient had had a living will, all of this could have been avoided. I cannot condemn the family for trying to give her time to recover from her current state. The extremely important opposition in the debate on PAS, AE and withdrawal of life-sustaining medical treatments is the religious argument. Ethically, “the sanctity of life prevails over the right of individuals to choose how and when they will die”. (Ersek49). The basic definition of suicide is the act of knowingly committing an act that will cause one's death. With this in mind, if a person knows that smoking will eventually kill them, it is not a form of suicide. If a doctor tells a patient that his arteries will continue to clog and if he doesn't exercise and start eating well he will have a heart attack and die, and the patient does nothing, this is not a form of slow suicide ? People are slowly killing themselves earlier every day because of their decisions. If a cancer patient decides to choose PAS, won't he kill himself first? Yes, I admit, it's definitely faster than eating a pound of it