A High Court judge has ruled that a woman who suffers from “extremely severe” anorexia can be force-fed against her wishes after an unprecedented and “very difficult” balancing exercise.
He came down in favour of “lifepreserving treatment” for the 32-year-old “gravely unwell” woman, known as E, after weighing “almost equally competing factors”.
The balance to be struck, Mr Justice Peer Jackson said, was “the value of E’s life in one scale and the value of her personal independence in the other”. The judge said: “We only live once — we are born once and we die once — and the difference between life and death is the biggest difference we know. E is a special person, whose life is of value. She does not see