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Joe Fab, producer and director of Rehm's documentary, became interested in end-of-life issues after his sister and both his parents died within four years. "We are just too frozen up in this country talking about death,” he says. Dr. Lonnie Shavelson, a former emergency room doctor who founded Bay Area End of Life Options in California, distilled the complex debate surrounding medical aid in dying, to a phrase, included in Rehm's book: "You've got the ethic of autonomy against the ethic of maintaining life." The American Medical Association sides with maintaining life, opposing what it still calls "physician- assisted suicide" because the group says it's "incompatible with the physician's role as a healer." The question that remains unsettled in the context of the physician's Hippocratic Oath is whether a doctor does more harm than good in writing a lethal prescription for a suffering, terminally ill patient. The Catholic Church and other religious groups have not given their blessing to medical aid in dying. Rehm is quick to say she respects all opposing views but remains steadfast in her support for the terminally ill individual choosing when his or her life should end.
At the conclusion of Rehm's book and documentary, she asks her grandson, Benjamin Zide, a Dartmouth sophomore studying medical ethics, to pick up his phone and take a video of her as she described what would be for her a "good death." Here's what she says: "I came across a perfect paragraph that Anne Morrow Lindbergh left behind. She wrote, 'To my family, my physician and my hospital: If there is no reasonable expectation of my recovery from mental or physical disability, I request I be allowed to die and not be kept alive by artificial means and heroic measures. I ask that medication be mercifully administered to me for terminal suffering, even if it hastens the moment of my death. I hope that you who care for me will feel morally bound to act in accordance with this urgent request.'"
Photo credit: PBS
Read more about this topic on Next Avenue.org: “How This NPR Host Became an Advocate for Assisted Suicide” “Choosing Death: Aid in Dying Gets Support” “Losing Her Husband Twice to Alzheimer’s Disease”
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