THE fight to legalise medical-assisted suicide for people who are terminally ill will take centre stage in the US this year, with bills filed in 20 states plus the District of Columbia.
“I feel it’s a watershed year,” says Peg Sandeen, head of the non-profit Death with Dignity National Center, based in Portland, Oregon, which campaigns for medical doctors to be in a position to prescribe lethal doses of barbiturates to terminally ill individuals
who request it.
The practice is currently legal or has been decriminalised in five states.
