BRUCE YELLE, of Florence, Oregon, a great campaigner for the rights of terminally ill people, died on 24 December 2020. He was 67. He had pancreatic cancer.
In 2018 He founded End of Life Choices to fight for improvements to Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act 1988. Bruce had deliberately moved home from California to Oregon in 2013 to take advantage of the medical assisted dying law as he had Parkinson’s Disease. Then he discovered that the state law could not help him. He determined to fight to improve it.
“Human rights, you know right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” he said. “We believe it is a human right to make human choices right up to the end of our lives.”
At the end, although Bruce had qualified for doctor assistance, and the prescription was in his fridge, his Home Hospice care kept him free of pain, thus he did not need it.
Lobbying legislators and physicians, Bruce worked constantly to try to improve Oregon’s old fashioned law. His persistence paid off with small changes. I enjoyed working with him on his board in the fight for those changes.. A good man, whom we shall all miss. R I P
–Derek Humphry
