SAN DIEGO — California became the latest state to allow the terminally ill to legally choose to end their lives on June 9, raising worries among some people in the state’s large Latino and African-American communities that poor people with serious illnesses could be pressured to take lethal drugs as a cheaper option to long-term care.
California is far more diverse than the other states where the option is available — Washington, Vermont, Montana and Oregon, the first to adopt the law in 1997.
Of the 991 terminally ill people who have decided to take life-ending drugs in Oregon, most have been white, over 65 and well educated, according to a February report from the Oregon Health Authority.
This spring, the national right-to-die advocacy organization, Compassion & Choices, named Latina, African American and Filipina-American women to reach out to minority communities. The group also set up a bilingual hotline explaining the law and held meetings in largely Spanish-speaking areas such as California’s Central Valley.
“We knew we would need to learn to talk about the issue around death and dying in a way that was not just recognizable to the white community,” said Toni Broaddus of Compassion & Choices.
In an April 14 column in the Chicago Tribune, cancer patient Miguel Carrasquillo called on his fellow Latinos to “break the cultural taboo of discussing death and medical aid in dying.”
He called himself the “Latino Brittany Maynard,” a reference to the 29-year-old California woman who was dying of brain cancer when she moved to Oregon to access the lethal drugs in 2014. Her story galvanized support for the proposal that became the California law.
