Rutgers Business Student Fighting to Pass Bill to Aid Terminally Ill
As a field organizer for Compassion & Choices Ethan Andersen helps move the dialogue forward
'We as a culture have a taboo against talking about death. By breaking down that taboo, you can take away that stigma and make sure your end-of-life wishes are followed.'– Ethan Andersen
When she chose to end her life rather than face the ravages she knew incurable brain cancer would bring, an eloquent young woman named Brittany Maynard sparked a national conversation this fall.
Now Ethan Andersen, a senior finance major in the Rutgers Business School-Newark and New Brunswick, is working to capitalize on that momentum and to move the discussion forward.
For him, it’s all about options.
As a field organizer for Compassion & Choices, Andersen travels throughout Southern New Jersey to promote a bill before the state Legislature that would allow patients to obtain life-ending drugs from their doctors once it’s determined they have no more than six months to live.
By a vote of 41-31 in November, the New Jersey Assembly passed the Aid in Dying for the Terminally Ill Act, which is now before the Senate. A vote is expected in the spring.
Andersen acknowledges that a healthy young college student is an unlikely proponent for a measure designed for patients facing wrenching end-of-life choices. But working as a volunteer at St. Peter’s University Hospital opened his eyes to the realities of terminal disease, he says, and having a grandmother whose kidneys are failing hammered those realities home.
“I saw a lot of people with no options and a lot of pain,” says the 21-year-old, who began volunteering with Compassion & Choices last year, collecting petitions at student centers on Rutgers’ New Brunswick campuses and overseeing the organization’s New Jersey Facebook page.
He soon signed a contract as South Jersey field organizer and social media director for the nonprofit. The organization aims to raise awareness throughout the medical field and make the option legal in more states than the five that now permit it.
“For the most part, this is one of those issues where the more you talk about it, the more sense it makes,” says Andersen, who gives presentations before Rotary Clubs, retirement communities and humanist groups, as well as handing out information at regional health fairs and train stations.
“We as a culture have a taboo against talking about death. By breaking down that taboo, you can take away that stigma and make sure your end-of-life wishes are followed,” the Flemington native says.
Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Montana and New Mexico already have so-called death with dignity laws in place; Oregon pioneered the movement in 1997.
Under the Aid in Dying bill being considered in Trenton, patients in the terminal stages of an illness could verbally request a lethal prescription from their physician, follow up with a second request 15 days later, and then make an addition request in writing signed by two witnesses.
As the legislation is written, patients would be required to administer the medication themselves, and no doctor or pharmacist would be required to provide the drugs if conscience dictated otherwise, Andersen explains.
He’s more than comfortable with the safeguards, which he says are there to prevent possible abuse.
“There are a lot of hoops to jump through,” Andersen says, “and that’s how it should be. The key is, the medication has to be self-administered and the patient has to show mental competency.”
Actors Patrick Stewart and Hugh Grant, English businessman Richard Branson and the scientist Stephen Hawking are among the more visible advocates of aid-in-dying measures, he says – although Hawking would not be eligible because he could not administer the drug himself.
Many family members and friends have joined the Rutgers student at hearings on the bill in the State Capitol. In his travels throughout the state, Anderson, a resident of New Brunswick, finds surprisingly little opposition, either from fellow students or from members of the general public.
“It is very rare to encounter someone who doesn’t support this issue, regardless of background,” notes Andersen, who hopes to stay with Compassion & Choices after he receives his bachelor’s degree in finance come May.
He credits this growing acceptance, in part, to increased awareness kindled by Brittany Maynard’s odyssey.
“Her bravery and the reverberations from her effort are still being felt,” Andersen says of the young newlywed who moved from California to Oregon after a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer to take advantage of Oregon’s law.
The business student, whose political advocacy includes volunteering for the campaign of U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, says many people who fill the prescriptions wind up not taking them – that a great sense of comfort comes from just knowing that path is available.
Of the 122 patients who obtained lethal drugs in Oregon last year, only 71 used them. The rest died naturally.
“The point is, you can take it in a week, you can take it in a month – or not at all,” Andersen says. “I don’t know if I myself would take it if the situation arose, but I do know I want to have the choice.”