Leipoldt, E: Euthanasia And Disability Perspective

This book opens an unusual angle on euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (EPAS). It is mainly based on in-depth interviews with Australian and Dutch people with quadriplegia. EPAS issues are most often treated within a context of a private exercise of individual autonomy. Indeed individual autonomy is the dominant social discourse of our age. But when looking at EPAS through disability perspective this discourse is at odds with the reality of life as intrinsically interdependent. One where positive social relationships for example provide a strong basis for life worth living,including under conditions of high dependence and involving losses of basic bodily functions, even pain - those often described as unbearable suffering in the EPAS debate. Just as life is a paradox, it seems that we carry a paradox inside ourselves. Where we normally look at life as if we are individual autonomous beings, when the chips are down, living it within acknowledged interdependence may appear to us as a sustainable reality. Disability experience thus illuminates a fundamental choice that may be open to anyone in approaching living and dying.