— by Polydamas
Reproduced below in full is the account of Brittany Maynard, a brave, intelligent, and beautiful young woman. In what should be the prime of her life, she is tragically dying of inoperable brain cancer. She has written a touching essay in the October 14, 2014 edition of CNN, titled “My Right to Death With Dignity At 29”, in which she explains her decision to voluntarily end her life (http://tinyurl.com/qfqu3rr).
It is an unimaginable tragedy in the 21st century when a child, young man or young woman is taken from the world of the living before enjoying a full life. With the eradication of childhood diseases in the early part of the 20th century, Americans have come to expect children to live until they are approximately 80 years of age or older. In what can only be a tribute to modern medicine, the untimely death of children is the exception rather than the rule. This was not always so.
In all of the previous centuries of human existence, the vast majority of parents were sadly accustomed with the heart-rending experience of burying one of their children and, often, more than one child. People who lived in previous centuries did not love their children any less than we do and did not mourn their passing any less. They simply recognized the fragility of life, the limitations of human understanding, and their lack of power to alter the inevitable. The religiously inclined believed that matters of life and death were in the hands of higher powers than theirs.
There are many who disagree with Brittany Maynard’s decision to hasten her impending demise. Some of them believe that the choice of who is to live and who is to die belongs to God. Others believe that the decision should be made by earthly powers, including but not limited to, the federal government, the state government in the state where Brittany Maynard lives, the city where she resides, a board of physicians, a council of wise elders, and the like.
In other words, like the fate of a tribeswoman of hundreds of thousands of years ago, these people want Brittany Maynard’s fate to rest in the hands of either the witch doctor of her clan (who represents the religious and spiritual realm) or with the chieftain of her clan (who represents earthly governmental authority). The two sides may not agree on almost anything, but the one thing that they do agree on is that the decision does not belong to Brittany Maynard herself. After all, she is their subject and not a sovereign unto herself.
As libertarians, we at The Cassandra Times are of the view that Brittany Maynard’s life — as well as death — belongs solely to her. However fiercely they may fight over her, neither the witch doctor nor the chieftain has any right to her life or to her death. She is a competent legal adult who has every moral right to decide what to do with her life and her body. She is a self-owner with sovereign rights over her body. If she wishes to live and die with dignity, it is her choice. If she chooses to spend every remaining moments of her life away from a hospital bed and free of mind-dulling drugs, she is free to do so. It is her body, her life, and her death to use and dispose as she sees fit.
While other people may agree or disagree with the wisdom or foolishness of her choice — and they are free to choose differently for themselves — she alone must make this decision and must accept all the consequences of her choice. This is what it means for an adult to have self-ownership. May Brittany Maynard enjoy what time remains to her, live her life to the fullest, and die as the master of her fate, not as the slave to the wills of others.
To paraphrase the words of the gladiators about to fight in Rome’s Colosseum,
“To Brittany Maynard who is about to die, we salute you!”
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CNN Editor’s note: Brittany Maynard is a volunteer advocate for the nation’s leading end-of-life choice organization, Compassion and Choices. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, Dan Diaz, and mother, Debbie Ziegler. Watch Brittany and her family tell her story at www.thebrittanyfund.org. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
(CNN) — On New Year’s Day, after months of suffering from debilitating headaches, I learned that I had brain cancer.
I was 29 years old. I’d been married for just over a year. My husband and I were trying for a family.
Our lives devolved into hospital stays, doctor consultations and medical research. Nine days after my initial diagnoses, I had a partial craniotomy and a partial resection of my temporal lobe. Both surgeries were an effort to stop the growth of my tumor.
In April, I learned that not only had my tumor come back, but it was more aggressive. Doctors gave me a prognosis of six months to live.
Because my tumor is so large, doctors prescribed full brain radiation. I read about the side effects: The hair on my scalp would have been singed off. My scalp would be left covered with first-degree burns. My quality of life, as I knew it, would be gone.
After months of research, my family and I reached a heartbreaking conclusion: There is no treatment that would save my life, and the recommended treatments would have destroyed the time I had left.
I considered passing away in hospice care at my San Francisco Bay-area home. But even with palliative medication, I could develop potentially morphine-resistant pain and suffer personality changes and verbal, cognitive and motor loss of virtually any kind.
Because the rest of my body is young and healthy, I am likely to physically hang on for a long time even though cancer is eating my mind. I probably would have suffered in hospice care for weeks or even months. And my family would have had to watch that.
I did not want this nightmare scenario for my family, so I started researching death with dignity. It is an end-of-life option for mentally competent, terminally ill patients with a prognosis of six months or less to live. It would enable me to use the medical practice of aid in dying: I could request and receive a prescription from a physician for medication that I could self-ingest to end my dying process if it becomes unbearable.
I quickly decided that death with dignity was the best option for me and my family.
We had to uproot from California to Oregon, because Oregon is one of only five states where death with dignity is authorized.
I met the criteria for death with dignity in Oregon, but establishing residency in the state to make use of the law required a monumental number of changes. I had to find new physicians, establish residency in Portland, search for a new home, obtain a new driver’s license, change my voter registration and enlist people to take care of our animals, and my husband, Dan, had to take a leave of absence from his job. The vast majority of families do not have the flexibility, resources and time to make all these changes.
I’ve had the medication for weeks. I am not suicidal. If I were, I would have consumed that medication long ago. I do not want to die. But I am dying. And I want to die on my own terms.
I would not tell anyone else that he or she should choose death with dignity. My question is: Who has the right to tell me that I don’t deserve this choice? That I deserve to suffer for weeks or months in tremendous amounts of physical and emotional pain? Why should anyone have the right to make that choice for me?
Now that I’ve had the prescription filled and it’s in my possession, I have experienced a tremendous sense of relief. And if I decide to change my mind about taking the medication, I will not take it.
Having this choice at the end of my life has become incredibly important. It has given me a sense of peace during a tumultuous time that otherwise would be dominated by fear, uncertainty and pain.
Now, I’m able to move forward in my remaining days or weeks I have on this beautiful Earth, to seek joy and love and to spend time traveling to outdoor wonders of nature with those I love. And I know that I have a safety net.
I plan to celebrate my husband’s birthday on October 26 with him and our family. Unless my condition improves dramatically, I will look to pass soon thereafter.
I hope for the sake of my fellow American citizens that I’ll never meet that this option is available to you. If you ever find yourself walking a mile in my shoes, I hope that you would at least be given the same choice and that no one tries to take it from you.
When my suffering becomes too great, I can say to all those I love, “I love you; come be by my side, and come say goodbye as I pass into whatever’s next.” I will die upstairs in my bedroom with my husband, mother, stepfather and best friend by my side and pass peacefully. I can’t imagine trying to rob anyone else of that choice.
