When the Right to Die Becomes a Duty

By Colleen Carroll Campbell

Linda Fleming, a 66-year-old, legally bankrupt cancer patient living alone in Sequim, Wash., recently became the first person to kill herself under her state's new assisted-suicide law. As in neighboring Oregon, where a similar law has facilitated more than 400 suicides since 1997, the measure that paved the way for Fleming's death allows suicidal adults to obtain lethal prescriptions as long as they are competent and have been diagnosed with a terminal condition by two physicians.

http://www.eppc.org/publications/pubID.3838/pub_detail.asp