Assisted Suicide Context: Nursing Home Death Due to Neglect

Context. Context. Context. As editorial writers wax eloquent about how assisted suicide would just be about “choice” and managing one’s own end of life, story after story is being reported about how those on the margins are abused, neglected, and marginalized.

This is one such awful story, reported today in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Mary Schneider lived in one of the city’s most exclusive retirement hotels, complete with gourmet meals and contracted around-the-clock care, but she died last year in agony and neglect, suffering horrific bedsores.

The bedridden 91-year-old died in May after a San Francisco city agency failed to properly investigate a complaint that she suffered from bedsores, according to criminal court proceedings and the agency’s own written procedures.

Stories like this should be considered when debating assisted suicide. But too many journalists and politicians take a decidedly myopic view of the story as being a contest between rational modernists who respect “choice” and the nasty pro lifers who want to control others’ lives.