India, March 13 -- Harish Rana was once a 18 year-old engineering student with the easy confidence of youth and the promise of a long life ahead. A tragic fall from the fourth floor of a building changed everything. Doctors managed to save his life, but not his brain. For the past 13 years, Harish has remained trapped in a body that breathes but does not live. The lives of his parents have been consumed by an exhausting cycle of caregiving, emotional anguish, financial burden and helplessness. This forced his family, and then the courts, to confront one of the most difficult ethical questions of modern medicine: Are we extending his life or merely postponing his inevitable death? What does dignity demand?

The Supreme Court of India has a...