Monday, July 22, 2013

A bioethicist confronts her convictions

Real life has a way of challenging even our deepest assumptions and our most committed abstractions. The right to die and the love of life are intertwined. Nobody should speak for anybody else, when choices must be made. Remarkable story.
“A person should be accorded the right to live his or her life as they see fit (provided, of course, that this does not significantly harm others), and that includes the very end of their life,” Peggy Battin wrote in one of her nearly 40 journal articles on this subject. “That’s just the way I see it.”
That’s the way she saw it after [her husband] Brooke’s accident too, but with a new spiky awareness of what it means to choose death. Scholarly thought experiments were one thing, but this was a man she adored — a man with whom she shared a rich and passionate life for more than 30 years — who was now physically devastated but still free, as she knew he had to be, to make a choice that would cause her anguish. “It is not just about terminally ill people in general in a kind of abstract way now..."
A Life-or-Death Situation - NYTimes.com