Suicide aid only for few
A TOTAL OF 111 people took their own lives during the first six months of California’s End of Life Option Act – a relatively small number for a populous state and one that could help passage of a similar law in New York, experts said Tuesday.
For the widower of aid-in-dying advocate Brittany Maynard, the number personal.
“It’s a testament to Brittany’s voice and advocacy, that those 111 individuals had the ability to stay at home, under the care of their own medical team, and be surrounded by friends and family when they died. Brittany didn’t have that. We had to move to Oregon for her to have a gentle passing,” Dan Diaz told the Daily News on Tuesday.
The new California law went into effect in June 2016. By the end of December, 173 physicians prescribed aid-in-dying drugs to 191 patients, the California Department of Public Health reported. is intensely
Of the 191 people, 111 used the medication to end their lives, officials said. The other 80 cases included 21 individuals who died without ingesting the drugs and 59 cases with no reported outcome by year’s end, officials said.
Maynard was 29 years old and suffering from aggressive, terminal brain cancer when she moved from California to Oregon in 2014 to end her life with physician-prescribed medication.
Three weeks before her death on Nov. 1, 2014, she went public and made international headlines with an intimate and brutally honest look at her impossible decision.
Maynard’s mother, Deborah Ziegler, and Diaz carried on her advocacy after her death. Their voices helped make California the fifth state in the nation giving patients with less than six months the choice of requesting end-of-life drugs from their doctors.
“I’m so immensely proud of Brittany for deciding to speak up to help people she would never meet,” Diaz said Tuesday.