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The Devil's Choice: Re-Thinking Law, Ethics, and Symptom Relief in Palliative Care

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Roger S. Magnusson
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Extract

In 1982, cinemas around the world screened Sophie's Choice, a film starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, adapted from the book by William Styron. The film opens with Stingo, a young journalist from the South, who arrives in New York in 1947 and rents a room in Brooklyn. Stingo is drawn into a relationship with Sophie and Nathan, the couple who live upstairs. Sophie is a Polish concentration camp survivor; Nathan is the man who saved her when she arrived in America. Nathan is charismatic, schizophrenic, and violent.

In one of the film's flashbacks, a German soldier imposes a terrible choice on Sophie, a young mother who arrives at Auschwitz with other prisoners from Krakow. Sophie is ordered to choose which of her two children will be sent to the ovens, and which will live.

Type
Independent
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 34 , Issue 3 , Fall 2006 , pp. 559 - 569
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2006

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References

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