Hunger Strike: Bioethical Considerations

Abstract

The students’ hunger strike has been inappropriately focused by opinions expressed and published mainly by local bioethicists and other academicians, when arguing that the strikers are immature, and that hunger strikes are ethically illegitimate. Although initiating a hunger strike is a private and personal matter, it is a public expression aiming at political effects. Therefore, influence and interventions by external agents –physicians, authorities, social leaders– have strong political connotations and carry responsibilities that require ethical analysis. Since the outcome of a hunger strike inevitably causes harm and maleficence –coercion, physical decay, death–, bioethics should strongly advocate that political movements ought to dissuade their supporters from employing the hunger strike as a political pressure tool, for whichever way such a strike finally ends, it will have led to incorrigible decisions and irreversible negative consequences. The Declaration of Malta pinpoints the dilemma between respecting the strikers’ autonomy and fulfilling the medical duty of avoiding evitable death. This dilemma between “dignity and life” is the scenario of tragic decisions, where any alternative chosen will have dire consequences and political effects. For this reason, bioethics is called on to exercise and advice prudence.