Most U.S. doctors now favor allowing patients suffering from an “incurable illness” to seek “a dignified death,” according to a large survey of more than 21,000 medical professionals — marking the first time that a majority of doctors has indicated support for physician-assisted suicide.
Medscape, an online resource for medical professionals that’s owned by WebMD, surveyed doctors across the country between September and November. Researchers found that 54 percent of respondents favored “death with dignity.”
That’s a significant increase compared to when Medscape first surveyed doctors on the issue. Back in 2010, just 46 percent of participants said they were supportive of the controversial policy, which is legal in just a handful of states.
“It represents a remarkable shift,” Arthur Caplan, who heads the division of bioethics at NYU Langone Medical Center, told NBC News. “If physician opposition continues to weaken, it is likely that despite fierce resistance from some religious groups and some in the disability community, more states will follow Oregon, Washington and Vermont, and legalize.”
Medical experts have long been divided on the question of whether terminally ill patients should be able to choose to end their lives. But the issue has perhaps recently gained momentum thanks to Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old woman who sparked a national conversation about right-to-die policies after publicly announcing her decision to end her life this fall.
After Maynard was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of terminal brain cancer, she and her husband moved to Oregon so she could take advantage of the state’s liberal physician-assisted suicide law. In the final weeks of her life, before taking a dose of lethal medication prescribed by a doctor in Orgeon, she partnered with the advocacy group Compassion & Choices to get her story out.
“I can’t even tell you the amount of relief it provides me to know that I don’t have to die the way it’s been described to me that my brain tumor would take me on its own,” Maynard said in a video she made before her death at the beginning of November, just a few days before she would have turned 30 years old.
Activists were hopeful that the widespread national coverage of Maynard’s story would help reinvigorate the largely stalled movement to expand physician-assisted suicide to more parts of the country. Since the beginning of 2013, seven states have introduced right-to-die legislation, according to the Death with Dignity National Center — and groups like Compassion & Choices are hopeful that there will be a renewed focus on advancing some of those measures next year.
Although doctors’ support for physician-assisted suicide has recently inched up, the general public’s views on the subject have remained relatively constant for decades. For the past 20 years, about seven in ten Americans have told Gallup that they favor right-to-die policies. But it depends on how pollsters ask the question. Framing the issue in terms of a doctor helping “to end the patient’s life by some painless means,” rather than in terms of “suicide,” increases approval by nearly 20 percentage points.