Maria Vargas’s Reviews > The Day I Die: The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America > Status Update

“Grief is singular, bound to those who suffer from it,” writes anthropologist Robert Desjarlais. “Grief itself cannot be shared, much as a wound cannot be shared. That cut is a person’s burden alone.”

In the first twenty-three years since Oregon passed the Death with Dignity Act, 2,895 patients received prescriptions under the law, and 1,905 died from ingesting the fatal drugs. That means that one-third of all patients who requested the medication never took it.

Between 2001 and 2018, about half of all patients in Oregon who ingested Seconal died within twenty-five minutes (twenty minutes for Nembutal).

It wasn’t until 1990, with the passage of the federal Patient Self-Determination Act, that patients across America were granted the right to reject medical treatment at the end of life.

To this day, the American Medical Association opposes assisted dying, arguing that the practice (which they refer to as “physician-assisted suicide”) “is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer.”

“I think that we keep people alive artificially in this country. We overmedicate and overtreat and overprescribe procedures. I would like to think that when my time is ready, I’ll know, and I’ll be glad to go. I have an expiration date, and I want to honor that.”

I feel the same as Derianna

Until well into the nineteenth century, suicide was considered a crime in America, punishable with confiscation of the deceased’s property and denial of a Christian burial.

Today, the end of life has become so medicalized that death is frequently seen as a failure rather than an expected stage of life. In the face of societal pressures toward staying young and fit, and a nearly unshakable trust in the power of medicine, death has come to be seen as an enemy to be defeated.

Hospice and palliative care have been at the forefront of a critical paradigm shift away from unnecessary—and often harmful—life-extending measures toward accepting and easing the process of dying. Since the 1970s, they have emerged as an antidote to the excesses of heroic medicine—our growing ability to prolong life through technological intervention, the “more is better” approach of modern medicine.

When systemic racism continues to haunt medical encounters in communities of color—and when death itself may be the result of deep-seated health inequalities—then an expedited death might not seem very appealing.

By statistics this can explain why the percentages are higher for white population.