Who Decides How You Die? Inside Montana's Assisted Suicide Fight

You may have the right to control your own life, but what about your own death? This is a question facing several states across the U.S., including, most recently, Vermont and Montana.

While physician aid-in-dying, or assisted suicide, has been legal in Oregon for almost two decades and legal in Washington for almost five years, other states have proved resistant to the idea. Reason TV was on the scene as this legal and moral battle played out in a somewhat surprising place: Montana, where conservative Republicans dominate local politics.

"We have a certain tradition here, going back to frontier days, of saying there are certain areas the government ought to stay out of," says Robert Connell, a Montana attorney who argued in the state's landmark Supreme Court case, Baxter v. Montana.

Connell's client, U.S. Marine veteran and retired trucker Robert Baxter, suffered from a terminal illness called lymphocytic leukemia and wanted the ability to take medication that would hasten his death and end his suffering. He died before Montana's Supreme Court could even issue the Baxter decision, which recognized a constitutional right to assisted suicide for all Montanans.

But that was just the beginning of this fight. Watch the video above to hear from legislators attempting to overturn Baxter and criminalize physician aid-in-dying once and for all, doctors who've risked their practices to write lethal prescriptions for suffering patients, and an elderly California man who's decided to take matters into his own hands whether the state likes it or not.

Approximately 9:30 minutes.

Produced by Zach Weissmueller. Camera by Paul Detrick, Tracy Oppenheimer, and Weissmueller.

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