Abstract
The American College of Emergency Physicians recently reported that as many as 100,000 to 200,000 geriatric patients are abandoned each year in emergency rooms across the country. At San Francisco General Hospital alone, three to four such patients are abandoned each week, often suffering from dementia or other ailments that impose serious burdens on their families. As the human life span is extended in postindustrial societies, those who used to die now grow old and often infirm, yet the younger population, the prop and mainstay of old age, is shrinking proportionately. Care for the aged has begun to be a matter of serious concern, both as a question of public policy and as a familial dilemma. It is also a matter of special concern for women. Since the turn of the century there has been an eight-fold increase in the number of people over the age of sixty-five. In that group, there are sixty-eight men for every hundred women-a ratio that widens to forty-five men for every hundred women by the age of eighty-five. As women tend to outlive men by an average of seven and one-half years, and as "it is now widely recognized that in the United States, families assume a large share of the care-giving responsibility for frail elderly family members," the problem can be put succinctly: Who should care for Granny?
Recommended Citation
Nelson, Hilde Lindemann
(1992)
"Frail Parents, Robust Duties,"
Utah Law Review: Vol. 1992:
No.
3, Article 2.
Available at:
https://dc.law.utah.edu/ulr/vol1992/iss3/2