By Malkaiah Mehlek ’15

There you are in the doctor’s office. The doctor stares gravely at his clipboard, unable to make eye contact with you. What the hell is going on? You think. The doctor usually says by now that you’re healthy and to continue your habits of eating plenty of vegetables and participating in the marathons that you train for daily. He awkwardly sits in the plastic chair next to you. “You have an inoperable brain tumor,” he somberly, but surely, states. “And you only have six months to live.”

This is just a scenario for you, but for tens of thousands of Americans each year, it’s a reality. People suffering from a terminal illness are most likely feeling afraid, fearful, but most of all uncertain. Uncertain of what the future holds, uncertain of what havoc their illness will wreak on them, and uncertain of how this will affect their families.

But death-with-dignity will provide them with a certainty on approximately how and when they will die.

Only five states — Montana, New Mexico, Washington, Oregon and Vermont – have legalized death with dignity acts. Death with dignity should be legal in all states because it provides a terminally ill patient with much needed peace and tranquility during a time of ambiguity and hopelessness. Not only would legalizing it in every state provide patients with a sense of security, but it would also remove the need of patients having to move to one of the five states in order to use death with dignity. A terminally ill woman, Brittany Maynard, had no choice but to uproot her life in California to become a resident in Oregon in order to use death with dignity. Not only did this process waste her remaining time on Earth, it also gave her more stress.

Maynard wanted to utilize death with dignity because she had an aggressive brain tumor. The treatment required to weaken her tumor, a full brain radiation, would have singed her scalp and left her with first-degree burns. If she had lived through the doctor’s prognosis of six months, she would have eventually developed morphine-resistant pain, and suffer both cognitive changes and motor loss. “Having this choice at the end of my life has become incredibly important,” Maynard said. “It has given me a sense of peace during a tumultuous time that otherwise would be dominated by fear, uncertainty and pain.”

State laws require possible patients to be 18 in order to use death-with-dignity. However, in severe circumstances a child may need access to the law as well. A woman waged a legal battle in the UK to allow her severely disabled 12 year old daughter, Nancy, to die. Her daughter suffered from multiple ailments, such as blindness, hydrocephalus, and meningitis. On November 4, a judge allowed Nancy to be given euthanasia, allowing her to have the peace she never had during her lifetime.

Ultimately, the terminally ill deserve a choice on how their lives play out. People may have their opinions on whether doctor-assisted suicide is moral or not, but the truth is that they are usually not in such a difficult position. Death-with-dignity allows terminally-ill people to have a calmness towards the remaining time of their life that they otherwise would not have.