Ezra Solway
Last year, 29-year-old Brittany Maynard was given the prognosis she had terminal brain cancer and less than six months to live. She decided that she did not want to die a prolonged hospitalized death with palliative care that would emotionally drain her and her family. Instead, she chose to move from California to Oregon with her family to exercise the Death with Dignity Act. This act allows terminally ill patients to end their lives quickly through lethal medication. Within five minutes, Maynard was asleep and half an hour later she had died a gentle death through her own volition, an entitlement she deserved.
Before she died, however, her advocacy for being able to die on her own terms sparked a debate over assisted suicide that has now led the California legislature to recently pass the End of Life Option Act, which could legalize physician-assisted suicide as early as next year if it is signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown.
So far Oregon, Vermont and Washington are the only states with laws legalizing assisted suicide. Courts in Montana and New Mexico have protected physicians who help their patients die, while several other states are currently reviewing similar laws. Maynard’s case clearly illustrated the necessity of assisted suicide in certain lucid and well thought-out circumstances. However, an ethical dilemma can occur when assisted suicide becomes legal, which is the issue of abusing the system.
If handled excessively, assisted suicide can turn into a default button that lazy physicians use when they compromise their professionalism with “compassion” for the patient.
Ira Byock, a professor at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, uses Holland as an example of the dangers associated with legal assisted suicide. Last year in Holland, more than 40 patients requested and received euthanasia for depression and other mental illnesses; one of which was a 47-year-old Dutch mother who was given her wish to die because she suffered from a condition called tinnitus, a chronic ringing in the ears. Boudewijn Chabot, the psychiatrist who helped spawn the legalization of euthanasia in Holland in 2001, has even said that the law “has gone off the rails.”
Nevertheless, the Die with Dignity Act in Oregon and the End of Life Option Act in California both contain more wary stipulations than Holland’s law, which aim to curb that type of potential risk. For example, the End of Life Option Act requires candidates to have been given less than six months to live by two different doctors, submit one written and two oral requests and clear a screening that inspects the patient’s mental faculties. Just as crucial is that after 10 years, the California act’s board will review the system and only continue if it feels assisted suicide has achieved sustained effectiveness.
There is no one right way to die. A terminally ill patient deserves the autonomy to choose the way he or she will die. Dying on her own terms allowed Maynard “a sense of peace during a tumultuous time that otherwise would be dominated by fear, uncertainty and pain.” The End of Life Option Act should be passed into law in California, but used with proper responsibility and care.
