In early 2005, at the same Academy Awards ceremony in which Clint Eastwood's Million-Dollar Baby was named best film, a Spanish movie called Mar adentro (The Sea Inside) by the young director Alejandro Amenábar received the Oscar for best foreign film of 2004. Though worlds apart esthetically, both films explore the themes of paraplegia and lives deemed not worth living, a cinematic coincidence that speaks of the enduring importance of issues such as these.The authors thank The Hastings Center for beginning our collaboration, Diego Gracia for having fostered it, and the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York and Doha for sustaining it.