Dying Woman Campaigns For End

A 29-year-old woman with terminal brain cancer is campaigning for expanded assisted dying laws in the US before she plans to end her life next month.


After being diagnosed with an aggressive tumour, Brittany Maynard relocated with her husband to Oregon, which has a death-with-dignity law.


They moved from their home in the San Francisco Bay area of California because it is not one of the five US states that allows assisted dying.



Only Oregon, Washington, Montana, Vermont and New Mexico currently have such laws on the books.


But Ms Maynard says not everyone in her predicament has the resources to uproot to another state.


She has launched an online video campaign for Compassion & Choices, an end-of-life non-profit organisation.



Ms Maynard plans to take a pill given to her by her doctors that will allow her to die painlessly in the bedroom of her new marital home in Portland.


She has chosen 1 November because it follows the birthday of her 42-year-old husband, Dan Diaz, whom she wed two years ago.


Ms Maynard says she will pass away surrounded by her loved ones, with her favourite music playing in the background.



Doctors diagnosed her malignant tumour in January and initially gave her up to a decade to live.


But in April she was told she had a Stage 4 glioblastoma, and that she probably had just six months to live.


She said she decided to end her life after learning from doctors what the tumour would do to her body in the final stages.


Ms Maynard says in a YouTube campaign video: 'I can't even tell you the amount of relief that it provided me to know that I don't have to die the way it's been described to me that my brain tumour would take me on its own.'



As well as highlighting the right-to-die campaign, she has travelled with her best friend to Alaska and visited Yellowstone National Park with her husband.


She also hopes to see the Grand Canyon for the first time before she passes away.


Ms Maynard says her illness has made her focus on what's important in life.


'Seize the day,' she says. 'What's important to you? What do you care about?



'What matters? Pursue that; forget the rest.'


Her mother, Debbie, says in the YouTube video that she has made a deal with her only child to travel to Machu Picchu in Peru, to meet her spirit in the Inca ruins.


More than 1,170 people have obtained prescriptions under Oregon's Death with Dignity Act since it was passed in 1997.


Fewer than half of them have used the medication to end their lives.






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