Bioethics: Helping My Husband Die

Abstract

This chapter is a Case Study of Peggy Battin, a distinguished bioethicist and champion of self-determination in dying. One question drives her scholarship: “Why should it be so hard to die?” It was Peggy’s mother who posed this question. Peggy was a junior in college, and her mother was at the tail end of a lingering cancer death. A key player in right-to-die legislation, Peggy has since helped make death easier for some people. These issues became acutely personal again more than fifty years later, when Peggy’s husband was horrifically injured in a bicycle accident. Bioethics issues related to autonomy in dying became far more nuanced when viewed from her husband’s bedside. Viktor Frankl’s existential psychology (logotherapy) is used to interpret Peggy’s unusually personal scholarship.

Since I’d always worked in bioethics I knew quite a lot about medicine generally… because I’d been around that all this time. And then to be the patient and the patient’s principal family member is—and every doctor who’s ever been sick says the same thing, “I never really understood it until I was the patient.” So suddenly you’re on the receiving end of this. You recognize it intellectually, but it feels different… has a much greater reality, because it’s not just about somebody else out there who’s broken their neck. It’s about you.

—Margaret Pabst Battin, Bioethicist, 2017