Brittany Maynard, a terminally ill brain cancer patient, ended her life amid controversy on November 1. Ms. Maynard’s highly publicized decision intensified the right-to-die debate, which continues to wage on.
Shortly after receiving her fatal diagnosis on New Year’s Day, 2014, Ms. Maynard moved from California to Oregon to take advantage of that state’s assisted-suicide law, and quickly became a champion for the death-with-dignity cause, launching a campaign with Compassion & Choices, an advocacy group for the terminally ill.
The media took notice, mostly because Ms. Maynard stood out due to her young age – just 29. She simply did not fit the public’s perception of what an assisted-suicide patient would look like. In fact, only six people younger than 34 have used the state’s assisted-suicide law; the median age is 71. The law has been in effect for 17 years, and there have already been more than 750 assisted suicides since the start of 2014.
According to Arthur Caplan of New York University’s Division of Medical Ethics, Ms. Maynard is significant because she is a “young woman getting people in her generation interested in the issue.” Caplan, who has argued that Ms. Maynard did nothing unethical, believes that it was her youth that drew the public’s criticism. “Critics are worried about her partly because she’s speaking to that new audience, and they know that the younger generation of America has shifted attitudes about gay marriage and the use of marijuana, and maybe they are going to have that same impact in pushing physician-assisted suicide forward.”
Caplan is optimistic about what may come from Ms. Maynard’s story. “My forecast is that we are going to see more push to put these laws in the front of state legislatures and to get them on state ballots. That may be her legacy to the physician-assisted suicide debate.”
Opponents, such as those involved with the Right to Life movement, believe that Caplan’s assisted suicide was exploited by Compassion & Choices. In a statement on its website, the National Right to Life said that Compassion & Choices has an “agenda [that] extends far beyond terminally ill 29-year-old women.”
In a New York Times piece, Ira Byock, chief medical officer of the Institute for Human Caring of Providence Health and Services, condemned the highly publicized nature of Ms. Maynard’s physician-assisted suicide. “When doctor-induced death becomes an accepted response to the suffering of dying people, logical extensions grease the slippery slope,” he wrote. “Moral outrage is appropriate and needed to fix the sorry state of dying in America. Legalizing assisted suicide fixes nothing. The principle that doctors must not kill patients stands.”
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