Today’s New York Times article on the end-of-life battle in Florida highlights the contextual issues within families that bring these fights to the courts.
Shaila Dewan writes (excerpt):
While the courts have been the main battleground, the case is fundamentally one of emotional, rather than legal, combat. It concerns the lengths to which love will go, the families people choose versus those they are born into and the question of who has the more valid claim to someone’s destiny. Society’s fears and suspicions collect around the stereotypes in play: a disloyal husband, overprotective parents.
“The case has been mischaracterized as the case of a woman who is disabled being starved to death,” said Dr. Daniel Sulmasy, a Franciscan friar, medical doctor and the chairman of the ethics committee at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. “But the real moral issue is these sort of thorny disagreements that occur in the settings of real families.”
Dr. Sulmasy, who regularly consults with relatives making life-or-death decisions within complicated family relationships, said it is easy for an ethicist to forget that people drag the flotsam of the past behind them.
“Is what’s going on here just a history of suspicion that these in-laws have had against their son-in-law from the beginning?” he asked. “Or did he rescue her from a family that was always smothering and they now feel that they have to continue to care for her the way they always have?”
Overwhelmingly, state laws and courts have granted the spouse the first right to make life-or-death decisions. Next come the children, and then the parents. In a system focused on nuclear families, this reflects the view that spouses are far better equipped to make proxy decisions because they share responsibilities and have known each other intimately in their adult lives, rather than in childhood.
Parents, on the other hand, must contend with generational asymmetry, the idea that caring flows down the family tree more strongly than it climbs up.
While children may nurse a permanent ambivalence toward their parents, said Janna Malamud Smith, a clinical social worker and the author of “A Potent Spell: Mother Love and the Power of Fear,” parents want nothing more than to have their children outlive them.
“Whatever your gratitude and deep love for a parent who raised you, you don’t have this ongoing mandate for this creature that `no matter what, I will protect you,’ ” Ms. Smith said.