Thousands of people in the U.S are currently living with a terminal disease, illness, or disability. A new day is never promised; but everyday until the last can be filled with excruciating pain and unhappiness. Whether they have inoperable brain tumors, like Brittany Maynard, or are paraplegic, like Brooke Hopkins, when someone’s value of life is diminished, they should be granted the personal autonomy to decide to end it.
Just last year, California’s governor Jerry Brown signed the End of Life Option Act into law; and it finally began being implemented in June of this year. The act very closely resembles Oregon’s previous Death with Dignity Act. Both acts legalize physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill who are sound of mind, within a certain life expectancy window, and have submitted multiple requests both written and oral. It is a step in the right direction seeing as previously, those begging for euthanasia who could not receive it had to resort to much more macabre methods of practicing their personal autonomy and ending their suffering.
As far as we’ve come medically over the last few centuries, there are still many cures that have yet to be discovered. Until those cures are found and hundreds of thousands of people are not forced to suffer countless hospital visits just to receive the same answers, we must do what we can to let them hold on to any semblance of quality of life they can attain. If we are not personally in the situation of the terminally ill, we cannot truly understand the seemingly endless suffering they are legally obligated to endure. We all have our morals and we all have our values, but our personal autonomy is granted in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and it is not our, or politicians, role to cherry pick which situations we are allowed to exercise our personal freedom, especially in cases where one is causing no harm to the common good.
California and Oregon have set the precedence for allowing the chronically ill and handicapped to have control over their bodies and their lives, and it is now time for the rest of the country to follow suit.
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