Mr Justice Peter Jackson said the 32-year-old woman, who has not eaten solid food for a year, might one day come to realise she was a “special person whose life is of value”. 
 
 Explaining his decision for her to be given life-saving treatment that neither she nor her family want, he 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.” 
 
 The judge said it was the first time he had dealt with a case in which providing life-sustaining treatment might not be in the “best interest” of a patient who was “fully aware” of their condition. 
 
 The judgment will increase debate about whether the authorities should step in to prevent people with serious illnesses from choosing to end their lives. There have been growing calls for assisted suicide to be legalised despite concerns that people who express a wish to die may change their view. 
 
 Dr Evan Harris, the former Liberal Democrat MP and member of the British Medical Association’s ethics committee, said it was a “very controversial judgment”. “The implications of force-feeding are really significant because she would need restraining or sedation and the treatment would last a year,” he said. “It might not succeed and is itself life-threatening. To impose that on a patient who might be competent in refusing treatment is a very major step.” 
 
 Dr Peter Saunders, the campaign director of Care Not Killing, which lobbies against assisted suicide, welcomed the ruling. “The judge has made a wise and courageous decision,” he said. 
 
 “In so doing he has emphasised that all human life is deserving of profound respect and strong protection, and also that acting in the best interests of people who are lacking capacity does not always mean acceding to their demands.” 
 
 The unnamed patient, from Wales, was described as a highly talented and intelligent woman who held ambitions of having a family and becoming a doctor before she became seriously ill in her mid-twenties. 
 
 She twice signed forms last year saying she did not want to be given treatment to keep her alive. She told the judge through a senior barrister that she felt her life was “pure torment” and that all her efforts to recover had failed. She now wants a “peaceful death”. 
 
 The judgment read: “She understands that she will die without intervention. She does not want to be killed, she just wants to be allowed to act as she wants. It is possible that she might change her mind, but not because somebody forces her to do so.” 
 
 The woman’s parents told the court they had given up hope that their daughter could recover. They said: “It upsets us greatly to advocate for our daughter’s right to die. We love her dearly but feel that our role should now be to fight for her best interests, which, at this time, we strongly feel should be the right to choose her own path, free from restraint and fear of enforced re-feed. 
 
 “We feel she has suffered enough. She stands no hope of achieving the things that she would value in her life and shows no signs of revising these aspirations.” 
 
 Mr Justice Jackson, who sits at the Court of Protection in London, indicated that the case was one of the most difficult he had encountered. He said the woman — identified only as “E” — stood only a 20 per cent chance of recovery even if she was put on an invasive force-feeding programme that would last at least a year. 
 
 “E’s case has raised for the first time in my experience the real possibility of life-sustaining treatment not being in the best interests of a person who, while lacking capacity, is fully aware of her situation,” the judge said. 
 
 However, he concluded: “E is a special person, whose life is of value. She does not see it that way now, but she may in future. I would not overrule her wishes if further treatment was futile, but it is not. Although extremely burdensome to E, there is a possibility that it will succeed.” 
 
 The woman’s illness dates back to her childhood. She suffered serious sexual abuse between the ages of four and 11, unknown to her parents. At 12 or 13 she began binge eating and forcing herself to vomit, and started to drink alcohol. 
 
 When she was 15 she was admitted to a specialist adolescent eating disorder unit, and later began a medical degree. However, she began drinking heavily after a bad relationship and dropped out of university. Between 2006 and 2010, she spent more than half of her time in specialist units for eating disorders or alcoholism. 
 
 The authorities made an urgent application to the court last month because the woman was refusing to eat and it was believed her death was imminent. ||||| A former medical student who suffers from extremely severe anorexia can be force fed against her wishes, a high court judge has ruled. 
 
 The 32-year-old, who has other chronic health conditions, lacked capacity to make a decision about life-sustaining treatment, Mr Justice Peter Jackson found. 
 
 Those who knew her best, the court heard, believed she should be left alone to have a "dignified death", but the judge said the state was honour-bound to see her treatment through for the long term. 
 
 Doctors have had the power to force feed anorexic people, in order to prevent them starving themselves to death, since 1997 under guidance from the Mental Health Act commission. 
 
 Delivering his decision at the court of protection in London, the judge said it was a very difficult decision to make in a situation requiring "a balance to be struck between the weight objectively to be given to life on one hand and to personal independence on the other". 
 
 Her case, he said, had "raised for the first time in my experience the real possibility of life-sustaining treatment not being in the best interests of a person who, while lacking capacity, is fully aware of her situation". 
 
 "In the end, the presumption in favour of the preservation of life is not displaced," he declared, adding that "it is lawful and in her best interests for her to be fed, forcibly if necessary." 
 
 The resulting interference with the rights of the woman, who lives in Wales and cannot be named for legal reasons but is referred to as E, was "proportionate and necessary in order to protect her right to life". 
 
 It is extremely rare, though not unprecedented, for carers to resort to court orders enabling them to force feed anorexics. The court of protection deals with cases where individuals are having difficulty making decisions about their personal health, welfare or finances. 
 
 E's case came before the court last month when an urgent application was made by her local authority, which also cannot be identified, which was "concerned that her position should be investigated and protected". 
 
 The judge said of her: "E's death was imminent. She was refusing to eat and was taking only a small amount of water. She does not seek death, but above all she does not want to eat or to be fed. 
 
 "She sees her life as pointless and wants to be allowed to make her own choices, realising that refusal to eat must lead to her death." 
 
 Mr Justice Jackson added: "She was being looked after in a community hospital under a palliative care regime whose purpose was to allow her to die in comfort." 
 
 The former medical student, described as an "intelligent and charming person", who began to control her eating at the age of 11, has not taken solid food for more than a year and when her Body Mass Index (BMI) was last measured it was 11.3 - a healthy BMI is in the region of 20. 
 
 E, who has also abused alcohol since adolescence as a "means of escape", has an "obsessive fear of weight gain". She was "an adult with an entrenched history of acute difficulties". 
 
 The judge said: "For E, the compulsion to prevent calories entering her system has become the card that trumps all others. The need not to gain weight overpowers all other thoughts." 
 
 Explaining the reasons for his decision, the judge said: "At its simplest, the balance to be struck places the value of E's life in one scale and the value of her personal independence in the other, with these transcendent factors being weighed in the light of the reality of her actual situation." 
 
 He said: "In E's situation, any decision is a heavy one. The balancing exercise is not mechanistic, but intuitive, and there are weighty factors on each side of the scales. 
 
 "On one side, I have been struck by the fact that the people who know E best do not favour further treatment. 
 
 "They think that she has had enough and believe that her wishes should be respected. They believe she should be allowed a dignified death." 
 
 The judge said he acknowledged the significant risks involved in treatment, "not excepting a risk to life", the modest prospects of success, the "wholesale and prolonged invasion of E's privacy and self-determination that is proposed", the "high chance that, even if short-term progress can be made, long-term difficulties will remain" and accepted that a resumption of treatment "deprives E of an imminent and relatively peaceful death". 
 
 Against those "weighty factors", the judge said he placed E's life "in the other scale". 
 
 He 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 it that way now, but she may in future." 
 
 The judge went on: "I would not overrule her wishes if further treatment was futile, but it is not. Although extremely burdensome to E, there is a possibility that it will succeed. 
 
 "Services and funding will now be provided that were not available before and it would not be right to turn down the final chance of helping this very vulnerable young woman." 
 
 As many as one in 200 women are affected by anorexia at some point in their lives. The condition most commonly develops among teenage girls. Around 5% of those affected die from complications caused by malnutrition.
– A 32-year-old suffering from extreme anorexia was ordered yesterday by a British court to be force-fed in order to save her life, reports the Guardian. Several people who know the woman asked that she be left to die a "dignified death," but the judge ruled that she lacked the capacity to make a proper judgment about her own treatment. While the judge recognized the woman's right to live her own life independently, "it is lawful and in her best interests for her to be fed, forcibly if necessary." The woman, a former medical student, has not eaten any solid food in more than a year, and now has a body-mass index of just 11.3 (normal is about 20, while less than 15 is considered severely underweight), according to the Telegraph. After such an extreme starvation diet, the unnamed woman reportedly has only a 20% chance of living, even if forced to eat, an invasive treatment that could last up to a year. "E is a special person, whose life is of value," wrote the judge. "She does not see it that way now, but she may in future."