California on 5 October 2015 allowed terminally ill patients to legally end their lives under a doctor’s supervision after state governor Jerry Brown signed the bill into law.
With this signing of the bill, California became the fifth state in United States to allow terminally ill patients to legally end their lives.
The other four states that allow such assisted suicides to terminally ill people are Oregon, Washington, Vermont and Montana.
The bill is partially inspired by the case of a terminally ill Californian woman who moved to Oregon to end her life and is modeled on the lines of Oregon’s assisted suicide system.
Oregon approved the assisted suicide system for the first time in 1994, however, it said that before receiving life-ending drugs, patients need two physicians to say that they have less than six months to live and are mentally fit to make the decision.
The right-to-die bill was introduced by the California lawmakers in 2015 for the first time since 2007. The lawmakers cited increased attention to end-of-life issues after the highly publicized case of Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old San Francisco Bay Area woman with terminal brain cancer who moved to Oregon to legally kill herself in 2014.
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