“A breakthrough moment”: New York Times credits Compassion & Choices with spearheading historic medical aid-in-dying expansion

“Everything about cancer treatment is hard,” says Jules Netherland, “but my death doesn’t have to be.” 

Since 2019, Jules has undergone many courses of chemotherapy, multiple major surgeries, and more than two dozen rounds of radiation to treat what is now metastatic breast cancer. She also became an advocate for the option of medical aid in dying in her home state of New York. 

Jules’ advocacy opens a recent New York Times column by Paula Span, “By September, Nearly a Third of Americans Will Live in States With Legal Aid in Dying.” The article quotes Jules as well as another Compassion & Choices advocate, Anne Gurnett Bander, and President and CEO Kevin Díaz: 

Jules Netherland traveled from her home in the Bronx to the New York State Capitol in Albany several times in the past few years, hoping to persuade the Legislature to pass a medical aid in dying bill, allowing terminally ill patients to end their lives with a lethal prescription. …

On June 9, 2025, after the Assembly approved the bill, Ms. Netherland was in the State Senate chamber, watching the aye votes mount, and seeing it pass. …

“A breakthrough moment,” said Kevin Díaz, president of Compassion & Choices, which has spearheaded the long campaign for such laws. 

Span’s column goes on to cite Díaz and public opinion polling on the broad support for medical aid in dying in the United States that has paved the way — alongside the persistent efforts of advocates like Jules and Dr. Gurnett Bander — for the legislative successes of the past year, with new medical aid-in-dying laws in Delaware and Illinois as well as New York. 

Like most people who qualify for medical aid in dying, Span notes, Jules Netherland and Annie Gurnett Bander aren’t sure they will use it. But, as Jules told Span, “I thought, ‘People should have this option.’ Now, they will.”

Read the full column here.