Comfort care

The AMA, the Catholic Church, and those who rely on utilitarian reasoning all support comfort care for those who are near death. The AMA sees it as reflecting a physician's duty to provide care in relieving pain even when there is no cure. The Catholic Church acknowledges that comfort care may hasten death, but points out that the intent is to reduce suffering and not to cause death. Utilitarians argue that comfort care will likely have more beneficial than adverse consequences for a patient and also for the patient's family than extraordinary efforts to sustain life. (And it will cost a lot less, too, which is relevant not only for utilitarian reasoning, but also for Catholic teaching, as cost is one of the factors that distinguishes extraordinary care, which is not a moral duty, from ordinary care, which is.)

Those who affirm a human right to health care would include the right to comfort care, but rights language is more commonly used to defend the right to die by declining life-support or the right to die with dignity by means of physician-assisted suicide (which is now legal in the states of Oregon and Washington). The Catholic Church defends the human right to health care, but opposed any notion of a right to die for it involves the intention to end life. But utilitarians might well support both the right to die and physician-assisted suicide, arguing that ensuring these rights is justified because more good consequences than not will likely be the result.