After making that difficult decision, where could this person go for help? It would help if that person lived in Oregon, since it is the only state in the US, where assisted suicide is legal. The patient would have to be mentally competent and diagnosed with less that six months to live, to obtain a lethal prescription drug. The patient would be expected to honor a waiting period of 15 days before taking the prescribed drug.
I also discovered that in April of 2001, the Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalize euthanasia. I wondered about the early history of euthanasia in the US? How long had crusaders struggled to get to the point where euthanasia was now legal in one state in the US and one country on this planet?
I was surprised to find that the fight to legalize euthanasia had actually begun in the early 1900s. In fact, the first bill to legalize voluntary euthanasia in the US was introduced in Ohio in 1906. Thirty-two years later, in 1938, the Euthanasia Society of America was founded in New York. I found it interesting that Jack Kevorkian was ten years old at the time.
There have been many events that happened between 1938 and 2001, concerning the right-to-die movement. I decided that to present the point of view of where a person could go to receive help with ending their life, I would focus on one of the largest right-to-die organizations in the US today, the Hemlock Society.
The Hemlock Society was founded in 1980 by an Englishman named Derek Humphry. Mr. Humphry, a journalist and author, became a euthanasia campaigner in l975 after his wife, who was suffering from painful bone cancer, was aided by him in taking her own life. He wrote about this experience in a book titled, "Jeans Way."
