Put the Elderly on Ice?

In a CNN Opinion piece, 82-year-old GWU professor Amitai Etzioni argues that:  "We should learn to accept death more readily; we should stop aggressive interventions when there is little hope; we should provide dying people with palliative care to make their passing less painful and less traumatic."  





But Professor Etzioni argues against using age as a criterion.  "Such a case may not just be that of an elderly person succumbing to a terminal illness -- it can be that of a preemie born too early to survive, a youngster following a car wreck, a worker following a tragic accident. We should learn from the Eskimos -- they long ago stopped abandoning their elderly just because they got "too" old."