Brittany Maynard acted bravely by committing suicide before succumbing to terminal brain cancer, and she demonstrated that end-of-life care increasingly honors patients' wishes, even when the choice is to forgo treatment and hasten death, an assisted suicide advocate told
Newsmax TV on Thursday.
David Mayo, vice president of the Death With Dignity National Center, told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner that "what Brittany did was, she took control," and that despite harsh criticism from
the Catholic Church, her suicide did not conflict with mainstream medical thinking on care for the terminally ill.
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Maynard, from California, drew national attention by moving to Oregon to take advantage of the state's "death with dignity" law for terminally ill people deemed mentally competent to choose euthanasia.
She died on Saturday at age 29 in the company of her family using a lethal dose of medication.
Mayo demurred at calling Maynard a hero, saying he is "reluctant" to characterize such a choice in terms of heroism — or cowardice. But he did say, "I think she was brave to do that."
Only three states — Oregon, Washington and Vermont — legally allow for assisted suicide. But Mayo, a former philosophy and bioethics professor at the University of Minnesota-Duluth, argued that death with dignity is a logical and ethical continuation of the trend in medicine toward patients' rights.
He cited text from a 1980s presidential commission on bioethics, which asserted that "new developments have made death more a matter of deliberate decision for almost any life-threatening condition" and that "[m]atters once the province of fate have now become a matter of human choice."
"So, increasingly, people die not because we didn't put them on dialysis or … do brain surgery on them for a hopeless tumor, but because someone has decided enough is enough," said Mayo.
"And the person who should decide that, according to federal law, is the patient," he said.
Mayo said that patients' rights laws works both ways, including for those who seek as much life-prolonging treatment as possible, or who may embrace suffering out of personal or religious conviction.
The Catholic Church holds that suffering is redemptive and that suicide is a sin. But Mayo said it would be "preposterous" to legislate end-of-life care according to any religious doctrine.
He also said that fears about the nation's first death with dignity statute, which Oregon passed in 1997, have not been borne out by experience. He said the state has "very strict safeguards" against assisted suicide for non-terminal people who have debilitating illnesses or who are suicidally depressed.
"The main objection is that this is too risky because people with disabilities will start being pressured to end their lives, and people will get the message that they mustn't struggle, and we want grandpa out of the way," said Mayo. "But that simply has not happened."
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