To my readers: Many people have asked me whether a death doula could help them access medical aid in dying in Colorado. Since I didn’t know the answer to that question, I invited a death doula to write a guest post. I am grateful to Vanessa Johnston for agreeing to educate us! Joanne By Vanessa Johnston Denver EOL Doula, LLC [...]
I had an interesting conversation with Dr. Jean Abbott, a retired physician, ethicist and hospice advocate about the concept of “death with dignity.” As a result of that conversation, I invited her to be a guest blogger so she could share her thoughts directly with you. Leave a comment, below, to tell me what you think about the subject. What [...]
In the US, we struggle, state by state, to get medical aid in dying laws passed, while in Canada, the whole country was approved at once in June 2016, through a ruling by the Canadian Supreme Court that required the Parliament of Canada to change the country’s laws to give dying people more control over how their lives end. It [...]
What’s it like to participate in medical aid in dying from a physician’s perspective? It’s not easy to figure out, because current regulations intentionally hide the identities of participating physicians. A clever team of researchers from the University of Colorado School of Medicine devised a way to survey the Colorado physicians who are most likely to care for patients looking for [...]
I stumbled across an excellent article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek written by Esmé E Deprez about a woman named Sandy Morris and her journey with ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease). The article explains how her illness inspired Morris to fight to change California’s End-of-Life Options Act, which has been in existence since 2016. Like me, Morris is a former [...]