Originally Posted by
Revolutionary_Jack
The latter. It's utterly absurd to make that case. And as the critic Sean T. Collins pointed out it's not realistic by any stretch:
"The final, fatal, unforgivable flaw, of course, is that it doesn’t even work from a standpoint of emotional realism. Simply put, if you ask any happily married couple to trade away their entire marriage, past present and future, to save the life of a septuagenarian mother figure, no matter how beloved, who probably is just a few years from dying anyway, the answer would be no."
— Sean T. Collins