This September, the End-of-life Options for Terminally Ill Patients Act (SB 1950), also named Deb’s law, will go into effect, legalizing Medical Aid in Dying in Illinois. Signed by Gov. JB Pritzker in December, the law seeks to add an option to end-of-life care supporters describe as compassionate.
MAID is a practice where decisional individuals with a terminal illness can choose to take a lethal prescription prescribed by a participating doctor. In Illinois, the individual must have a life expectancy of six months or less. Though the practice is soon to be legal, there are still questions surrounding how it will function in the state.
“Law is a very blunt instrument. It’s legal, or it’s illegal,” said Dr. Michael Aref, palliative care doctor and professor in Medicine at the University, in an interview with The Daily Illini. “There’s not a whole lot of shades of gray, and unfortunately in medicine and biology, there’s a ton of shades of gray.”
Some of the questions Aref raised were technical. For example, if you have to be able to take the medication independently, it may impact the eligibility of those with motor deficits to participate. Other concerns were more sweeping, including Champaign-Urbana’s downstate location.
“The hospice and palliative care resources in this area are not what they are around big academic centers or in big cities,” Aref said.
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Part of MAID is helping patients understand the options they have available to them. With medical aid in dying becoming an end-of-life care option, Aref believes it’s important that palliative and hospice care options are well funded so patients can make a more informed decision.
MAID may come with a lot of unknowns and concerns, but Illinois won’t be the first state to navigate them. Eleven other states and the District of Columbia have legalized the practice.
“When I did emergency medicine back in the 1980s, that was a new field, and so I felt like I was one of the people in a new frontier,” said Dr. Robin Plumer, owner of Compassionate Endings medical aid in dying private practice in New Jersey, in an interview with The Daily Illini. “And now here I am again, kind of on the edge of a new frontier of medicine. It’s very exciting to see new states come on board and to have more people be able to access this.”
Since New Jersey legalized medical aid in dying in 2019, Compassionate Endings has done close to half of all MAID cases in the state, according to Plumer. Her work has been informed in part by Dr. Lonny Shavelson, who helped found the Academy of Aid-in-Dying Medicine.
“So he put together this whole series of lectures, which is now on their website and is really the main training tool, and I imagine that they will be very active in Illinois in terms of coming to Illinois and helping practitioners who want to learn how to do (MAID),” Plumer said. “It’s not starting from scratch anymore.”
Though MAID will be legal, providers can still choose not to participate in the practice. Catholic regional provider OSF HealthCare has already declined to take part. In New Jersey, no hospitals take part in MAID, and the practice is carried out through private practices such as Compassionate Endings.
Regardless of who chooses to participate, Plumer believes that the existence of the option is important when individuals are facing a terminal illness, especially after reflecting on her career in the emergency department.
“People who came into the emergency room often didn’t know they were gonna die, and neither did their families, and that was wrenching,” Plumer said. “This is such a contrast to that. For me, it feels like such a relief to be able to offer people a peaceful and gentle death.”
