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January 4, 2024
A women from Connecticut became the first nonresident in Vermont to end her life via medically assisted suicide on Thursday.
Lynda Bluestein, 76, traveled to the Green Mountain State on Wednesday in preparation for her planned death. The woman’s son, Jake Shannon, told News 12 Connecticut Bluestein would die by lethal injection.
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“Id like to be remembered as someone who never thought that second best was even in the realm of possibility, who always believed that you can make everything better,” the woman said, condemning her home state as “cruel” for not offering medically assisted suicide.
“Our state has failed my family and many others,” she said of Connecticut. “Who can take a calendar and say, ‘Thats the day Im going to die?’ I was astonished on how cruel that felt.”
Bluestein was suffering from terminal bouts of ovarian and fallopian tube cancers. The five-year survival rate for these kinds of cancers stands at 31%, according to the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
Bluestein and her physician, Dr. Diana Barnard, sued Vermont in 2022, according to ABC News, claiming the state’s residency requirement for medically assisted suicide violated the Vermont state constitution.
“Ms. Bluestein has lived a happy and meaningful life and does not want to die,” the lawsuit stated. “Should her suffering become unbearable, however, she wishes to have the option of medical aid in dying available to her.”
She reached a settlement with Vermont in March 2023, when the state dropped its residency requirement for Bluestein. A couple of months later, in May, Vermont became the second state to remove its residency requirement altogether, allowing doctors in Vermont to prescribe life-ending medication to any terminally ill person who is 18 years or older.
After seeing her mother die of cancer in 2022, Bluestein said she didn’t want to experience a similar fate.
“She said, ‘I never wanted you to see me like this,” Bluestein said of her mother, continuing, “I don’t want my children to see me like that, either. I’d like their last memories of me to be as strong as possible, to interact with them and not in an adult diaper curled up in a fetal position, drugged out of my mind.”
In addition to Vermont, nine states and Washington, D.C., allow medically assisted suicide: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, and the state of Washington. Only Oregon and Vermont allow nonresidents to obtain it.
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