JD Department Editor Ms. Shultz is Professor of Law at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley.
Women live longer than men.
They are more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer's disease. First heart attacks are more often fatal in women than in men. Inequitable pay and lower pension and social security benefits cause more elderly women than men to live in poverty, making access to health care more difficult for them. Important as these differences are, however, they do not explain all the gender variation surrounding death. Although advance directives are widely accepted, they engender complexities that involve the fundamental nature of individual autonomy in the United States.