As people get older, especially once they have acquired illness, people who work in hospitals have a harder time believing that they should be resuscitated. In Timmermans article on social death, nurses mention that they believe the elderly have lived their life and sometimes resuscitating them causes them more pain than it is worth it.
There is also sometimes much debate on whether or not it is right to let a person die, even if they ask to, if not everything has been done to try to keep them alive. The opinion about this varies depending on the age of the person, and how sick they are.
In this article, it explains the story of a 5 year old girl with a fatal neurodegenerative disease, which causes her muscle and movement to get weaker and weaker. This means that as she gets older, it gets more difficult for her fight off sicknesses, even those as simple as the flu. As mucus began to develop in her lungs and cause pneumonia, she kept having to return to the hospital and undergo painful procedures to have it removed and also try to cure her every time she got sick.
Eventually the pain was so much that this 5 year old girl told her mom that next time she got sick, she would rather “go to heaven” at home rather than go back to the hospital and be treated again. This raises a lot of ethical questions. As a child who is only 5 years old, is she allowed to make the decision to not be treated? Since she is still able to communicate her wants, she should be able to voice her opinion; however, as parents this would be such a hard decision to make as they don’t want to see her in pain, but she is still so young and hasn’t experienced enough of her life. Do her parents have the right not to listen to her, especially since, in the end, it is her life?
I think that this is very similar to the arguments people give for abortion. In these arguments, they say that because a baby does not have a voice, a mother does not have the right to end his/her life. So now, this 5 year old girl does have a voice and opinion, are her parents still allowed not to listen to her?
http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/27/health/girl-chooses-heaven-over-hospital-part-1/index.html
Sociology of Healthcare 