To Help Patients End Their Life When They Choose is An Act of Care - Martin Winckler (Marc Zaffran, M.D.)
Life is a journey. It sounds like a cliché, but the analogy works. We’re embarked on a boat – our body – that we didn’t choose. Our parents made that choice – or that mistake – for us, and we bear the consequences. We spend many years depending on and relying on adults, long before we can make decisions by ourselves. From late childhood or early teenage we long to be free. But to be officially allowed to drive, drink, vote, get married, we need to reach an arbitrary age limit. Once we do, it doesn’t get much easier, but at least, we have the feeling everyone lives under the same principles. Right ? Wrong. In many developed countries, personal autonomy is not only valued, it is promoted and protected. This has been especially true in healthcare, since the second half of the 20th century, in reaction to the many unethical medical experiments that were performed on helpless people, not only in Nazi Germany during the Second World War, but also in many other countries – including