“Elder sex. Nursing home dalliances. The erotic lives of dementia patients.
T”hose topics make many people squeamish. But many of the nearly 1,200 readers who responded to an article about a 78-year-old former Iowa state representative charged with sexual abuse after being accused of having intimate relations with his wife, an Alzheimer’s patient, in a nursing home discussed late-life sexuality in frank, often personal, and sometimes heartfelt terms.
“In the article, Pam Belluck described the case of Henry Rayhons, who had been told by nursing home administrators that his wife was too cognitively impaired to consent to sex. Mr. Rayhons pleaded not guilty to the charges and says that while he had sex with his wife when she had a private room, he did not have sex with her in the semiprivate room on the night in question.”
