Even amongst proponents of physician-assisted suicide (myself included), there is something intuitively different about dementia cases. Where are we to draw the line of competency? How do we know that decisions made are truly legitimate expressions of someone’s will? And how do we ensure that physician-assisted suicide will not be misused, or abused, either by patients or by others? What Hershey’s story—and what the millions of untold stories like his—illustrate is not that we need to immediately legalize euthanasia, but that we need to think critically about how we define care for our aging population. How do we ensure that our aging population, particularly its most vulnerable members, are afforded both protection and autonomy? If physician-assisted suicide is legalized broadly, then do we have an obligation to allow for euthanasia as well, or for provisions that grant patients in the early stages of dementia access to this option? These are questions with no easy answers.
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 19:31:50 +0000
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