Assisted Suicide Legal in 13 States as Some Patients Cite Financial Pressure and Burden on Family
Updated
Programs like Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) or Death With Dignity (DWD) are being approved across the country now, with New York becoming the 13th state to legalize medically assisted suicide. Oregon was the first state to implement a program nearly three decades ago, in 1997. The law is controversial as people are concerned that the lives of individuals will be taken too soon and perhaps without full and true informed consent.
Assisted suicide was a hot-button issue in the 1990s when Dr. Jack Kevorkian, nicknamed “Dr. Death,” was tried multiple times for the practice of giving patients a “suicide machine” that would administer lethal drugs or carbon monoxide. This took place in Michigan without any assisted suicide laws being legalized at the time. Dr. Kevorkian reportedly helped 130 patients commit suicide before being charged with second-degree murder in 1999 after he administered the lethal injection himself.
Oregon’s latest DWD report, released last month, indicates the state has prescribed lethal medication to a total of 5,520 people since 1997. 3,691 people have died from ingesting the medications, which represents 1% of the total deaths in Oregon during that time period. People who are approved for the program receive the medication, and they can take the medication when they want or not take the medication at all.
In 2025, 637 patients received medication, and 400 are confirmed to have died from ingesting the medication. 100 did not take the medication, but died of other causes. Another 80 died with unknown ingestion status, as follow-up information was not yet available at the time of the report. For the other 99 patients, it is unknown whether they have died and whether or not they have ingested the lethal medication. These numbers add up to more than 637 because there are some patients who received prescriptions in 2024, but didn’t ingest the lethal medication until 2025.
All states, except Montana, require a patient to have a 6-month prognosis of survival to qualify for the program. Most state laws also require confirmation by multiple physicians and that the patient be mentally competent and able to self-administer the medication.
While 94% of the confirmed assisted suicide deaths in Oregon ingested the lethal dose within six months, the other 6% outlived their six-month prognosis. The data does not indicate how much longer these individuals lived before they ingested the medication, and it is unknown how much longer they would have lived had they not ingested the prescription.
Prognosis estimates are clinically uncertain based on studies. Researchers conducted an observational cohort study of 98,187 individuals between 2010 and 2020 and found that 37.4% of those given a prognosis of months to live actually lived for at least 1 year. 7.8% of those given days to live and 13.7% of those given weeks to live also survived for longer than a year despite the clinical prognosis of imminent death.
The HighWire reported in October about a patient in Colorado who was allegedly coerced into assisted suicide after she was diagnosed with “terminal anorexia.” The Colorado report indicates that an increasing number and percentage of DWD patients have the primary terminal condition of “severe protein-calorie malnutrition,” which can be caused by “terminal anorexia.” In 2021, there was one Colorado patient with this condition, representing 0.5% of all patients. In 2024, that number increased to 18, representing 3.5% of all DWD patients.
Oregon also tracks end-of-life concerns of patients who seek lethal prescriptions as part of the DWD program. 40% of patients listed burden on family and caregivers as one of their concerns, while 6% of patients said financial implications of treatment were an end-of-life concern. These may overlap with other concerns, as losing autonomy (89%) and being less able to engage in activities making life enjoyable (89%) were the most commonly cited concerns.
From 1998-2023, the average duration of a doctor-patient relationship was nine weeks, and the average duration between the first request and death was 39 days. Those numbers have dropped in the last two years. The patient-doctor relationship duration dropped to 5 weeks in 2024 and 4 weeks in 2025. The duration between the first request and death dropped to 27 days in 2024 and 24 days in 2025.
Among the 637 prescriptions given by 155 Oregon physicians in 2025, there were five physicians who prescribed 21 or more during the year. One physician gave lethal prescriptions to 101 patients during the calendar year.
52.5% of Colorado’s DWD patients were 75 or older in 2024, the most recent year of available data. In 2025, 46.3% of Oregon’s DWD patients were 75 or older. 7.5% of Oregon’s DWD patients in 2025 were under the age of 55, including 14 patients between the ages of 18 and 34 and 48 patients between the ages of 35 and 44.
Some Canadians are warning New Yorkers about the opening of Pandora’s Box with the new law, while offering their stories about coercion and claims that the Canadian program has been used to euthanize individuals they feel are draining the health care system. Canada is scheduled to legalize assisted suicide for individuals who solely have a mental illness beginning in 2027, barring any successful legal challenges. While deaths from assisted suicide in Oregon represent about 1% of all deaths in the state, that percentage is 5% for the entire country of Canada.