Category: Overseas

The state Assembly approved legislation Wednesday that would allow terminally ill patients to legally end their lives after an emotional and deeply personal debate, sending the proposal to the Senate that is expected to endorse it. It was the second effort by California lawmakers this year to allow doctors to…

Paralympic world champion Tanni Grey-Thompson discusses the arguments for and against assisted dying with two doctors on this CNN video.

LAST year Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old Californian, was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Rather than let the illness take its dreadful course she moved to Oregon, where a “Death with Dignity” law exempts doctors from prosecution, with some safeguards, if they prescribe life-ending drugs to terminally ill patients who ask…

Compassion & Choices’ intense campaign to authorize aid in dying in California achieved major victories recently. After months of hard work and an emotional 90-minute debate yesterday, the California Senate passed the End of Life Option Act by a vote of 23 to 14!

There is nothing about the home we visit near Arnhem, south of Amsterdam, to suggest it is anything but ordinary. It is council collection day and assorted bits of broken or outworn furniture line the pavement. A postman asks 77-year-old Toos Pietersma to take a package for an absent neighbour.…

When Gerard began to be seriously ill, he insisted: “I don’t want to leave you with a mess to clear up.” He was dependent on frequent blood transfusions. A controversial antibiotic used to treat a serious lung infection had destroyed his mountaineer’s sense of balance. Walking, even with a crutch,…

Today, the Supreme Court of Canada, in a unanimous decision, confirmed that Canadians have the constitutional right to choose physician assistance in dying.

The country’s system for handling end-of-life care is largely broken and should be overhauled at almost every level, a national panel concluded in a report released on Wednesday.

MY father would have been thrilled to read “Dying in America,” a new report by the Institute of Medicine that argues that we subject dying patients to too many treatments, denying them a peaceful death. But he would have asked what took us so long. A physician from the late 1950s to the late 1990s, my dad grew increasingly angry at how patients died in this country, too often in hospitals and connected to machines and tubes he knew would not help them.

Sara Thomas Monopoli was pregnant with her first child when her doctors learned that she was going to die. It started with a cough and a pain in her back. Then a chest X-ray showed that her left lung had collapsed, and her chest was filled with fluid.