Abstract

VILANOVA, Luíza Michelini; FROHLICH, Cláudia Bechara  and  KIERNIEW, Janniny Gautério. To make live, to let die: ethical-political considerations in palliative care for covid-19's period in Brazil. Rev. SBPH [online]. 2022, vol.25, n.2, pp.42-54. ISSN 1516-0858.  https://doi.org/10.57167/Rev-SBPH.v25.482.

The covid-19 pandemic has put us in front of death and pain. In Brazil we see, through the government measures and the behavior of part of the population, the emergence of a speech that naturalizes deaths. This article is a theoretical research that started from discussions in the research Group Núcleo de Pesquisa em Psicanálise, Educação e Cultura (NUPPEC/eixo 2) that has worked, between 2017 and 2019, through research and intervention in a general hospital in the south of Brazil. Our presencial work was interrupted in March 2020; however, a discussion about the distinction between the signification of death as a natural process, one of the foundations of palliative care, and the naturalization of certain deaths emerged. In this article, we will approach the theoretical principles that guide the palliative care, articulating them with the Western death process (Ariès), Brazil's social-political context, and the ideas of to make live/to let die (Foucault) and necropolitics (Mbembe). We concluded that the ethics of care, which is part of the strategy of palliative care, can contribute to the pandemic context, since it emphasizes life's qualite and the dignity of death, widening the narrative's conditions in the face of death and grief process.

Keywords : death; palliative care; health; necropolitics.

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