Living Wills and Gay Marriage

By Rick Kraft | Published on September 7, 2011 | 0 Comments

An unexpected illness, injury or accident can occur to anyone at any time. These events can leave a person terminally ill, or in a vegetative state or permanent coma. Generally, medical facilities must use all possible means to keep a person alive as long as possible, unless the person has provided written instructions which counter that obligation. To be effective, those instructions must be in the proper legal format. According to Rick Kraft of the Kraft Law Offices, the document providing those instructions is called a Living Will.

A living will in Boston, or anywhere else, states that if the person who signs the Living Will is ever in a terminal or vegetative state, or in a permanent coma, they wouldn’t want measures taken to keep them alive—and if those measures are in place, they should be withdrawn. A Living Will can provide peace of mind to both the individual creating it and his or her loved ones, who are secure in the knowledge that the person will not be kept on life support indefinitely—a very troubling prospect to many people. There are many reasons for writing Boston living wills. For one, the client may simply not want to become a constant charge on their family and friends. For another, they cringe at the thought of being kept alive but having no ability to appreciate being alive in a situation where only their body—but not their mind—were still functioning.

Living Wills in Boston are important for everyone, but all the more so for same sex couples and unmarried couples, whose relationships are not recognized by the law in at least some contexts, says Kraft. Along with a healthcare proxy, which designates a spouse, partner, or anyone else the person specifies to make medical decisions when the person can’t do so for themselves, a Living Will is a critical component to make sure your wishes for the type of care to be administered or withheld are implemented. Without an explicit document designating who should be involved in these decisions, medical facilities will look to whomever they think is closest to the patient – which is often a blood relative rather than a same-sex spouse or unmarried partner. Boston Living Wills and healthcare proxies establish the person you choose, rather than anyone else, as the one to be consulted for important treatment decisions and questions about when and under what circumstances to discontinue life support.

With straight married couples, medical facilities automatically look to the husband or wife for these types of decisions. But with gay marriages (depending on the state), this party must be unequivocally designated in the living will and healthcare proxy. Indeed, this is primarily a state issue, says Kraft, because some states (like Massachusetts) recognize a gay couple’s marriage, while other states don’t. Imagine that one partner in a gay marriage falls into a permanent coma in Massachusetts. Before this event occurred, this person had decided not to remain on life support, but never put those wishes in writing, in a living will. The go-to party would be the person’s same-sex spouse. But what if the same married couple were traveling in another state and one of them became terminally ill? What if this happened in a state that doesn’t recognize gay marriage? Now there’s a controversy, says Kraft, where the facility quite likely would consult with family rather than the same-sex spouse or an unmarried partner. So even in Massachusetts and Boston, living wills and healthcare proxies are critical, both to ensure a same-sex spouse is the one to implement your wishes and to specify whom should do so if the spouse were unable – for example if he or she were injured in the same accident.