who’s call is it when it comes to you living or dying???

August 16th, 2009

An Australian quadriplegic has won the right to die. An Austrailian high court has ruled that 49-year-old Christian Rossiter has won the right to refuse food and water and can be allowed to die. A Perth nursing home took the case to court after Mr Rossiter told staff repeatedly he wanted to die.

The Supreme Court of Western Australia declared that Rossiter’s care givers had a legal obligation to comply with his request to stop feeding him. The court ruled Rossiter may order his care givers at a Perth nursing home to stop feeding him via a tube in his stomach.  

Rossiter considers himself a champion of other quadriplegics who no longer find life worth living. “I’m happy that I won my right to die,” the former stockbroker and mountaineer told reporters from his nursing home bed. Rossiter is pleased to be setting a new Australian legal precedent, saying now “similar quadriplegics can choose whether they want to live.”

Rossiter broke his spine in 2004 in a road accident and was left a spastic quadriplegic after a fall last year.

Rossiter attended the hearing in a wheelchair, breathing through a tracheotomy tube in his throat. He told the judge he wants to die. It’s a point he has been making publicly. “I can’t move,” Rossiter said in a televised interview this week. “I can’t even wipe the tears from my eyes. And I’d like to die. I’m imprisoned in my own body. I have no fear of death. Just pain.”

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