Being a burden to others and wishes to die: The importance of the sociopolitical context.

All articles in May 2019's special issue of Bioethics offer profound insights into the issue of "being a burden to others" in relation to wishes to die, which are highly relevant for ethical debates about end-of-life care and physician-assisted dying. In this reply, we wish to stress the importance of acknowledging and analyzing the sociopolitical context of the phenomenon "being a burden" in relation to wishes to die and we will show how this analysis could benefit from a care ethical approach. As discussions in care ethics have made clear, caring practices are both social and political practices. An empirical and ethical analysis of "being a burden" therefore needs to take institutional and societal norms and structures into account, in addition to first-person experiences and concepts such as caring needs, relational autonomy, and interdependency. Besides the relevance of the sociopolitical context for the phenomenon "being a burden" as such, the sociopolitical context also seems relevant for the investigation of the phenomenon, which we will illustrate by reflecting on "being a burden" in relation to the practice of physician-assisted dying in the Netherlands.