On Nov. 1, barring the medically unexpected or a change of heart, a young woman named Brittany Maynard will ingest a lethal prescription and die by suicide. Maynard is 29, recently married and is suffering from terminal brain cancer. After deciding against hospice care – fearing, she wrote in a CNN op-ed, a combination of pain, personality changes and the loss of basic mental and physical functions – she and her husband moved from California to Oregon, one of five states that permit physician-assisted suicide. In the time remaining to her, she has become a public advocate for that practice’s expansion, recording testimonials on behalf of the right of the terminally ill...
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