California lawmakers are considering granting the dying wish of Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old newlywed who left the state and moved to Oregon after she was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.
On Wednesday, Maynard’s husband and her mother stood with California lawmakers to introduce a bill that would allow terminally ill residents to choose the time of their own deaths.
“This option is something that Brittany and I thought should be available to all Californians,” said Dan Diaz, Maynard’s widower, during an emotional news conference on Wednesday, the Los Angeles Times reported.
“Brittany was a Californian. We lived in this state, and she would have preferred to pass away peacefully in this state,” Diaz added.
Maynard’s campaign to die on her own terms garnered international attention and galvanized a near-dormant debate over the right of terminally ill Americans to end their lives.
Before Maynard legally ended her life on 1 November under Oregon’s Death With Dignity law, she publicized her case in the hope that her story would lead to political action in California and across the US.
“Please help me carry out my daughter’s legacy,” Debbie Ziegler, Maynard’s mother, said at the press conference, choking back tears. “Please help me assure that other terminally ill patients don’t face what we had to face.”
Maynard was diagnosed last June with a terminal brain tumor. Doctors initially believed she had years to live but later told her she had less than six months. In January 2014, Maynard, accompanied by her family, left her home state of California to move to Oregon, so that she could take advantage of the state’s aid-in-dying law and end her life “when the time seemed right”.
Maynard became a public advocate – and the new face – of the right-to-die movement in America during the final months of her life, appearing in videos on YouTube and penning an op-ed for CNN.
She also partnered with the advocacy group Compassion and Choices, which created the Brittany Maynard Fund to help support right-to-die campaigns around the country. According to the group, at least 11 other states in addition to California have pledged to introduce bills that authorize death with dignity. These initiatives, the group says, were inspired in part by Maynard’s story.
The California bill is modeled on Oregon’s “death with dignity” law, which was approved by voters in 1994 and made Oregon the first US state – and one of the first jurisdictions in the world – to authorize such a law.
Opponents of the California bill pledged on Wednesday to fight it, while supporters promised to take the initiative directly to voters if state lawmakers fail to act.
Under the proposed End of Life Options Act, two California physicians must first determine that a patient has six months or less to live and is mentally competent. The doctors must also discuss palliative-care options, as well as other, nonlethal means of easing the pain, with the patient before prescribing life-ending drugs.
The bill would guard physicians, pharmacists and healthcare providers who choose to assist terminally ill patients from civil and criminal liability while allowing medical practitioners to choose whether or not they wish to participate.
Once the drugs are prescribed, the patient would still be able to choose when – if ever – to take them. Those who decide to end their lives would be required to administer the drugs without assistance.
Since the Oregon law was passed in 1997, physicians have prescribed barbiturates to 1,173 patients, 752 of whom died after ingesting them, according to the state’s health authority.
The right-to-die movement has made a handful of hard-won gains since the Oregon law took effect. In 2006, Oregon’s law was validated by the US supreme court after the Bush administration challenged it.
Washington state voters approved a death with dignity act by referendum in 2008, and in 2013 the Vermont legislature approved a similar law, making it the third state in the US to allow residents to legally end their lives. Court decisions have rendered aid in dying legal in Montana and New Mexico.
California voters rejected a ballot initiative that would have legalized aid in dying in 1992, and the state legislature has voted down similar bills at least four times.
But supporters of the aid-in-dying movement are hoping the timing – helped by Maynard’s story – and the context has changed since then.
