Christy O’Donnell, a terminally ill Christian single mom who sued the state of California last month for the right to die, just wants to end her life on her own terms.
O’Donnell, an attorney and former sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department, was diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer in 2014 that has since spread to her brain after months of
aggressive chemotherapy, according to Fox 43. If the new chemotherapy treatments fail her, O’Donnell is expected to live for only a few more months before dying a slow and painful death, according to her doctors.
In a May 18 video posted on YouTube by Compassion and Choices, an advocacy group that aided Oregon woman Brittany Maynard in lobbying for the possession of legal prescription drugs to end her life after her brain cancer diagnosis in 2014, O’Donnell described her fear regarding a prolonged and painful death.
“The most likely way that I'm going to die with the lung cancer is that my left lung will fill with fluid, I'll start drowning in my own fluid,” O'Donnell says in the video. “I spend an inordinate amount of time being afraid of the pain that I'm going to endure. All of that time that my mind spends thinking about that, I am not living.”
Although she is lobbying for the right to obtain a lethal dose of prescription drugs to use if and when she is ready to die, O’Donnell maintained, “But not being afraid to die is not the same as wanting to die. I don't want to die.”
Responding to religious objections for physician-assisted suicide, California State Sen. Bill Monning, who co-wrote the End of Life Option Act, declared that “Nobody gets forced into this option if they don't want to. We know there are some who have religious principles where they don't support this end-of-life option. We don't seek to change church doctrine. We don't seek to enforce this on anybody, only a voluntary patient, working with
doctors, are engaged, voluntarily,” according to CBS News.
O’Donnell claims in the YouTube video that she has been a proud Christian her entire life, saying that “I believe in God, I pray and I have an entire support system that prays for me.”
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