Vermont will become the fourth state to make it legal for a physician to prescribe lethal medication to a terminally ill, mentally competent patient who wants to end his life.
Under the state's voter-approved Death with Dignity Act, a terminally ill patient may take the lethal drugs if two doctors agree that the person has less than six months to live and is mentally competent to decide whether to end his life.
The state is one of only five in the country with an act which allows mentally competent, terminally ill adults to end their lives with medication prescribed by a doctor.
Both supporters and opponents of physician-assisted dying anticipated that Judge Dorothy McCarter's ground-breaking ruling that the Montana constitution guaranteed terminally-ill, mentally-competent adults the right to end their own lives would be appealed to the that state's highest court.
There was, they said, "no major depression or other mood disorder which affected her thinking" and she was "totally competent" to make the decision to end her life, a judgment which seems to me at odds with their own diagnoses.
Under the state's so-called Death with Dignity Act, a terminally ill patient may take the lethal drugs if two doctors agree the person has less than six months to live and is mentally competent to make the decision to end his or her life.
Under the state's so-called Death with Dignity Act, which was passed by voters in 1994 and took effect in 1997 after legal challenges, a terminally ill patient may take the lethal drugs if two doctors agree that the person has less than six months to live and is mentally competent to make the decision to end his life.
Competent and motivated people tend to end up guarding important gates -- it's good to know these people.
1 Several safeguards in the law ensure that patients are adult, competent, terminally ill, and choosing to end life voluntarily but not impulsively (box).
One tactic to avoid prolonged dementia, after initial diagnosis, is to take steps to end one's existence while still competent.
