My father, Robert Quinn, lived in California’s Bay Area. In 2018, at age 82, he was diagnosed with cardiac amyloidosis — a rare, incurable disease that would progressively make it harder for him to breathe. His doctors at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center told him that, at the end, he would likely suffocate.
He was not afraid of dying. What frightened him was lingering — gasping for air, dependent on others, stripped of the independence that defined his life. He often said he was more afraid of living as an infirm person than of dying.
California’s End of Life Option Act gave him a choice: If he became terminally ill and remained mentally competent, he could obtain medication to end his life peacefully.
During the last years of his life, we often talked about him moving to Illinois to be closer to me and my family. One factor that gave us both pause was Illinois did not offer the same option. It wasn’t the only consideration, but it mattered to him.
After thoughtful and unhurried, honest conversations with his doctors, rabbi, friends, children and grandchildren, my father turned to California’s medical-aid-in-dying law. He wanted a death that reflected how he had lived: intentional, dignified and on his own terms.
He was 84 when he died in January 2020.
My wife and I flew from Chicago to be with him the morning he chose. At O’Hare Airport, we ran into friends on our flight headed to Pebble Beach for a golf weekend.
When they asked why we were going to California, we weren’t sure what to say. We simply told them we were going to see my father — a small, slightly awkward moment that still makes me smile, because life keeps its ordinary rhythms even on the most extraordinary days.
When we arrived, my father was ready. He told us he loved us, and just before drinking the prescribed medication, he said quietly, “See you on the other side.” He fell asleep within minutes and died peacefully at home, without pain or fear.
It was, in the truest sense, a loving death.
The Illinois House and Senate have now passed the End-of-Life Options for Terminally Ill Patients Act, and the bill awaits action by Gov. JB Pritzker. Illinois should give its residents the same dignity my father was fortunate to have. By enacting this law, our state can ensure terminally ill adults may meet the end of life just as he did — with autonomy, courage and grace.
Jonathan Quinn, Glencoe.
Dignity is the right to live — not pressure to die
Across the country, and now in Illinois, lawmakers have advanced a so-called “medical-aid-in-dying” bill that promises compassion and choice. The language sounds reassuring: autonomy, dignity, self-determination.
But for many disabled and marginalized people, the legislation represents the collapse of real options — not choice.
In the early hours of Oct. 31, the state Senate pushed through the End-of-Life Options for Terminally Ill Patients Act through rushed, opaque circumstances, leaving disability organizations and impacted communities with no time to weigh in.
Now it sits on the governor’s desk. This is not how ethical policymaking works, and it reflects a larger pattern. When disabled voices are sidelined, the resulting policy cannot claim to protect autonomy or dignity.
Polling shows while Americans value compassion and bodily autonomy, support for medically-assisted death drops sharply when people learn that disabled individuals often turn to it because they cannot access housing, care and other essentials. People want fairness not coercion disguised as compassion.
Our research at Northwestern University’s Center for Racial and Disability Justice shows disabled people, especially those who are poor, Indigenous, or people of color, are already offered help to die more readily than help to live.
In Canada, some have been pushed to medically-assisted death after being denied home care or accessible housing. Similar pressures are emerging in the U.S. When disability, poverty and systemic neglect make life unbearable, that is not “autonomy” — it is abandonment.
The rhetoric around medically-assisted death frames it as a tightly regulated option for terminal illness. In reality, safeguards are eroded. Research shows physicians routinely underestimate disabled people’s quality of life, oversight is minimal, and there is no guarantee people receive palliative care or community support before being offered death.
When governments and insurers fund dying more readily than living, we must ask: Whose dignity is being protected?
These laws also undermines suicide-prevention efforts by carving out an exception that suggests disabled lives are less worthy of saving. Research from other countries shows troubling “suicide contagion” effects when the procedure is normalized.
The answer is not expanding medically-assisted death but expanding accessible housing, community-based services, palliative care, mental health supports and disability benefits that allow people to live with dignity.
Illinois may have rushed this bill through, but Gov. JB Pritzker still has a choice. And so do we. True compassion is measured not by how easily we allow people to die, but by how hard we fight for their right to live.
Kate Caldwell, director, Research & Policy, Center for Racial and Disability Justice, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
Trump’s turkeys
On TV news last week, there was a scene of President Donald Trump and two turkeys. The text across screen said he was “pardoning turkeys (on the left).”
Of course, Trump has pardoned many turkeys before — politicians, crooks and Jan. 6 rioters. There are others too, but the list is too long to publish here.
Dennis Fitzgerald, Melbourne, Australia