The two videos in which Brittany Maynard explained her decision to end her life under Oregon’s Death With Dignity Act put a human face — and a very young one — on a sometimes abstract debate.
Viewers saw her walking in the woods with her husband. There were glimpses of the small purse that held bottles of legally prescribed barbiturates and the sunny bedroom where she intended to take a lethal dose. They heard her mother tearfully support her decision.
As mournful piano music played, they heard Ms. Maynard, 29, express relief that she would be able to die peacefully, when she chose, rather than wait for an aggressive brain tumor to kill her.
And they heard her offer hope that her story could influence the nation’s end-of-life discussion. She had moved from California, where physicians cannot legally prescribe drugs to end the lives of patients, to a state where terminally ill patients have had that option since 1998. “I would like all Americans to have access to the same health care rights,” she said.
Advocates say that Ms. Maynard, who ended her life on Saturday, has indeed advanced that cause. The two videos — shot for Compassion and Choices, a national organization supporting legal aid in dying, and released in early October and then last week — have drawn more than 13 million views on YouTube.
Ms. Maynard appeared on the cover of People magazine and on CBS’s morning and evening news programs, and made headlines internationally. More than five million people visited her page on the Compassion and Choices website; 400,000 signed an online card. On Sunday, as news of her death spread, the website drew 240,000 visits an hour, the organization said.
“Our phones are ringing, ringing, ringing,” said Peg Sandeen, executive director of the Death With Dignity National Center in Portland, Ore. “We see people having conversations around dinner tables or with friends at work, and this time we see those conversations among young people.”
In Compassion and Choice’s 30-year history, “Nothing has touched as many people as Brittany’s story and changed the dialogue around death with dignity the way this has,” said Mickey MacIntyre, the group’s chief program officer. “We saw people running for office put this story on their Facebook pages or talk about it when they were campaigning, which isn’t usually the case.”