Death With Dignity Advocate
This undated file photo provided by the Maynard family shows Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old terminally ill woman who plans to take her own life under Oregon's death with dignity law. Maynard has fulfilled a wish on her bucket list when she visited the Grand Canyon with her family last week.
(AP Photo/Maynard Family, File)
In this Oct. 21, 2014 photo provided by TheBrittanyFund.org, Brittany Maynard, left, hugs her mother Debbie Ziegler next to a helicopter at the Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona. The 29-year-old terminally ill woman has fulfilled a wish on her bucket list: visiting the Grand Canyon. Maynard, who has advanced brain cancer, has said she plans use Oregon's death-with-dignity law to end her own life Saturday, Nov. 1, 2014 though she could still change her mind. Maynard and her husband moved to Oregon from Northern California because Oregon allows terminally ill patients to end their lives with lethal medications prescribed by a doctor.
Brittany Maynard, a terminally ill California woman, had expected to kill herself Nov. 1, less than three weeks before her 30th birthday. But now that decision is being delayed.
Maynard, who expects to take her own life under Oregon's assisted-suicide law, now says she is feeling well enough to possibly postpone the day she had planned to die, The Associated Press is reporting.
While her health continues to deteriorate, she has expressed in a new video she's still enjoying many smiles and laughs with her family and will delay taking a doctor-prescribed medication to end her life until the time feels right, The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting.
"I still feel good enough, and I still have enough joy -- and I still laugh and smile with my friends and my family enough -- that it doesn't seem like the right time right now," The Associated Press reported she says in the video for Compassion & Choices, a nonprofit end-of-life choice advocacy organization dedicated to expanding death-with-dignity laws nationwide. "But it will come because I feel myself getting sicker. It's happening each week."
Maynard captured the hearts of many earlier this month when she told her powerful and heartbreaking story in a YouTube video for Compassion & Choices. Maynard moved from California to Oregon to access the state's Death with Dignity Act and shared that she planned to take her life on Nov. 1. She emphasized she wasn't suicidal, but wanted to die on her own terms and reserved the right to move the date forward or push it back.
"If November 2 comes along and I've passed I hope my family is still proud of me and the choices I've made," Maynard says through tears in the new video, The San Francisco Chronicle reported. "And if November 2 comes along and I'm still alive I know that we'll still be moving forward like a family out of love for each other and that the decision will come later."
Maynard was diagnosed with incurable brain cancer earlier this year after dealing with an onset of excruciating headaches. Because her home state of California does not have an aid-in-dying law, she moved to Portland and has become an advocate for getting such laws passed in other states, The Associated Press reported.
Doctors initially told her she had a brain tumor called a grade II astrocytoma, according to The San Francisco Chronicle. She would be lucky to live three to ten more years. The diagnosis was almost impossible to grasp as Maynard was newly married and hoping to start a family.
Months later, doctors discovered Maynard's condition had deteriorated rapidly and diagnosed her with stage 4 glioblastoma, the most lethal form of brain cancer, The San Francisco Chronicle reported. Doctors told Maynard she had six months to live and that she would become progressively ill as the massive tumor in her head grew even larger.
She considered death with hospice care in her San Francisco Bay Area home, but wrote in a CNN op-ed piece, "I could develop potentially morphine-resistant pain and suffer personality changes and verbal, cognitive and motor loss of virtually any kind."
Maynard didn't want to experience a slow and painful death and she hated the thought of her family members seeing her suffer, The San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Maynard's story, accompanied by photos from her pre-illness wedding day, broke hearts across the globe while igniting a national debate on the issue of physician-assisted suicide.
One opponent is Philip Johnson, a 30-year-old Catholic seminarian from the Diocese of Raleigh, North Carolina. He, like Maynard, has inoperable brain cancer and is plagued by headaches and seizures, according to The Associated Press.
After learning of Maynard's choice, he wrote an article explaining his view that "suffering is not worthless," and it's up to God to take life, The Associated Press reported.
"There is a card on Brittany's website asking for signatures 'to support her bravery in this very tough time,'" Johnson wrote on the diocese website, the Associated Press reported. "I agree that her time is tough, but her decision is anything but brave. I do feel for her and understand her difficult situation, but no diagnosis warrants suicide."
Kara Tippetts, a mother of four dying of cancer, wrote Maynard an open letter urging her to reconsider, The San Francisco Chronicle reported.
"In your choosing your own death, you are robbing those that love you with such tenderness, the opportunity of meeting you in your last moments and extending your love in your last breaths," Tippetts wrote.
In her new video, Maynard addresses those who disagree with her choice, The San Francisco Chronicle reported.
"I think sometimes people look at me and they think, 'Well, you don't look as sick as you say you are,' which hurts to hear, because when I'm having a seizure and I can't speak afterward, I certainly feel as sick as I am," she says in the new video. "The worst thing that could happen to me is that I wait too long because I'm trying to seize each day, but I somehow have my autonomy taken away from me by my disease because of the nature of my cancer."
Oregon was the first U.S. state to make it legal for a doctor to prescribe a life-ending drug to a terminally ill patient of sound mind who makes the request. The patient must swallow the drug without help; it is illegal for a doctor to administer it, The Associated Press reported.
Oregon voters approved the Death with Dignity Act in 1994, then reaffirmed it -- 60 percent to 40 percent -- in 1997. It took more than a decade for another state to join Oregon, but four other states now have such laws.
More than 750 people in Oregon used the law to die as of Dec. 31, 2013, most of them elderly, The Associated Press reported.