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Many people concern themselves with the here and now, but Law Professor Valerie Vollmar has devoted her professional life to helping people deal with the future. For more than a decade, she has crusaded for the rights of terminally ill patients to decide when and how they will die.

Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act was the first legislation in the United States to give terminally ill patients - rather than medical professionals - the ultimate right to make their own end-of-life decisions. Vollmar’s user-friendly website about physician-assisted death has been significant in furthering national and international discussion about the issue, providing information about legislative and medical developments. The site has received heavy traffic from doctors, lawyers and patients, and Vollmar has been interviewed on TV and radio broadcasts and quoted in newspapers across the country.

Many terminally ill patients prefer to die at home, Vollmar says. They want to be surrounded by loved ones and avoid the numbing pain that often accompanies terminal illness, and they don’t want to leave their families with crushing medical bills in order to prolong an existence of questionable quality. In short, they want to choose the moment for goodbyes and to be fully conscious — rather than adrift in a morphine haze — so they can share the process with those they love.

Oregon’s law allows doctors to prescribe — but not administer — the medication that will end life. “That action is left to the patient,” Vollmar says. “If you know something about the dying process, you know that pain management is not always possible. We have more people living longer, and living with chronic pain, and our medical system is overly technological. Many patients don’t want every single measure to be taken. This legislation gives patients more choice.