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Essay On Death With Dignity Act

1681 Words7 Pages

Can you imagine going through long battle with a disease only to be told that you have only 6 more months to live. All of these thoughts and questions start running through your head and you feel like you’re dreaming or having some sort of out of body experience. Being diagnosed with a terminal illness is unimaginable, emotional and physically trying. Cancer is the number one leading cause of terminal death in the United States, to put that into a better perspective one out of every four deaths is cancer related. That’s about 564,000 deaths annually and 1,500 deaths per day. With that shocking statistic comes the thought of losing to this terrible disease that you’ve let define you for so long. That’s what Brittany Maynard thought until she came across the Death …show more content…

After Maynard went through with this act, the recognition for Death with Dignity began to soar but even then only five states allow this act to be done legally which needs to change. The Death with Dignity Act is an extremely beneficial policy that many people don’t know much about but when correctly educated on the matter many people will realize how truly helpful the act really is.
The Death with Dignity policy has been around for over 20 years and has dated back and argued about since the early 1990s. It was officially made a law in Oregon in 1994 with 51% in favor and officially went into effect in 1997 (Oregon 's Public Health System). Although this implementation was delayed by a legal injunction. On October 27, 1997, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the injunction. In November 1997, a quantity asking Oregon voters to annul the Death with Dignity Act was placed on the general election ballot (Oregon 's Public Health System). The people of Washington approved their policy in 2008 and it was executed in 2009 after no

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