Barbara Coombs Lee is president emerita/senior advisor of Compassion & Choices, the nation’s oldest and largest nonprofit organization working to improve care and expand choice at the end of life. Before becoming an advocate, she had a 25-year career as a nurse and physician assistant, during which she often cared for terminally ill patients. She attended many patients who suffered through fruitless procedures and prolonged stays in intensive care. As an emergency room and intensive care nurse, she was often obligated to perform painful and pointless interventions on dying patients.
Those unforgettable experiences informed Barbara’s career in law and health policy and prompted her professional devotion to individual choice and empowerment in healthcare. In 2019, Barbara completed her second book, Finish Strong: Putting YOUR Priorities First at Life’s End. Finish Strong is a practical guide based on her 50 years of firsthand experience in nursing, medicine, law, public policy and advocacy. In Finish Strong, Barbara calls for all Americans to join a patient-driven movement to dismantle the institutional and cultural barriers to living well to the very end.
In her early years, as a private attorney, staff to an Oregon State Senate committee and a healthcare executive, she championed initiatives that allow individuals a full range of choices and full agency in their healthcare decisions.
Staffing the Oregon Senate Healthcare and Bioethics committee in 1991, Barbara assisted State Senator Frank Roberts Roberts as he introduced one of the first aid-in-dying bills in the nation. Unfortunately, the committee never approved the bill and Roberts died of prostate cancer in 1993, suffering the kind of slow, painful death his bill sought to help people avoid.
In 1994 Barbara co-authored and became one of three chief petitioners for the Oregon Death with Dignity Act. She served as spokesperson through two statewide campaigns and spent 10 years defending the nation’s first Death with Dignity law against attacks in both the judicial and legislative arenas.
In 2008, Barbara served as a senior advisor for the Washington State Death with Dignity ballot initiative voters approved by an 18-point margin. Washington became the second state to permit aid in dying. In 2009, the Montana Supreme Court ruled in the landmark case brought by Compassion & Choices (Baxter v. Montana) it does not violate the state’s public policy for a physician to provide aid in dying to a mentally competent, terminally ill adult. Under her leadership Compassion & Choices successfully championed the California End of Life Option Act in 2015.
Barbara has been interviewed by all leading media outlets. She has testified before the U.S. Congress. She has spoken in hundreds of venues over the past twenty-five years. She is a seasoned traveler and tireless firebrand.
She studied literature at Vassar College and nursing at Cornell University, and earned advanced degrees in law and medicine from the University of Washington and Lewis & Clark College. Barbara is a member of the Oregon State Bar.
Recent writing and speaking by Barbara Coombs Lee:
Various articles by and about Barbara
https://compassionandchoices.org/tag/finish-strong-media
Various blog posts by Barbara
https://compassionandchoices.org/tag/barbara-coombs-lee-author
“The Brittany Effect” – How One Woman Transformed the “Death with Dignity” Movement, TedX Marin, September 2015
Compassion & Choices: A conversation with Barbara Coombs Lee, Plato Society, November 2015
Oregon’s experience with aid in dying: findings from the death with dignity laboratory, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, July 2015
