The Right to Refuse Life-Sustaining Medical Treatment in South Korea: The Case of Ms. Kim*

Abstract

In North America and elsewhere there exists a legal and ethical consensus concerning the right of patients to refuse life-sustaining treatment and the right of families or other proxies to make such decisions for patients who are themselves unable to do so. This consensus emerged gradually and through several landmark legal rulings, such as those made in the cases of Karen Ann Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan. In South Korea, on the other hand, there is no consensus on the rights of families to make decisions concerning the refusal of life-sustaining treatment on behalf of incompetent patients and, until recently, there was no legal recognition of a patient’s right to refuse life-sustaining treatment. However, the situation in Korea seems to be changing with the recent court rulings in the case of Ms. Kim, a case which may do for medical practice in Korea what the case of Karen Ann Quinlan did for the practice of medicine in the US. This paper makes a contribution to the much-needed consensus-building process in Korea by reviewing some of the landmarks cases in the international right-to-die movement, identifying the key legal and ethical lessons from those cases, and then applying those lessons to the case of Ms. Kim in order to evaluate the decisions that have been made in her case so far and to make further recommendations on what else needs to be done.