“What is Death with Dignity? Does it have something to do with death row?,” a friend of mine asked me when I told her the topic of my eighth-grade forum paper.

The Death with Dignity Act allows terminally ill people with less than six months to live to end their lives using lethal doses of prescribed medication. The act allows people to control their lives and meet their death head on, with dignity and not with fear.

Oregon is the only state out of 50 to pass its own Death with Dignity law. Since the law was passed there 10 years ago, approximately 250 people have ended their lives using it.

Currently, Washington state is trying to pass its own Death with Dignity law (Initiative 1000), which has the same concepts, requirements and safeguards as those modeled in Oregon. (In 1991 the measure was up for vote in Washington and lost, but only by a small margin.)

Death with Dignity (which is also known as physician-assisted suicide) is all about choice and the ability to have those choices respected. America is, after all, supposed to be the land of the free. Death with Dignity offers comfort to those who are terminally ill and gives them the ability to make life-changing — and life-ending — decisions. It changes the way the dying look at death, and it is an example of the freedom granted to every American. However, not everyone sees this revolutionary concept as a blessing; instead, many see it as a curse, something that goes against both God and the nature of the human soul.

Death with Dignity allows those who can legally access it to plan out their own death, choose where they pass away, choose who is with them when they go and, most importantly, gives them the ability to decide when to die. Death with Dignity means that the hastening of death does not have to be painful and illegal — rather that death can be an option for those already dying and in pain, a final choice for those who know death is as much their right as life.

Many people are opposed to Death with Dignity because they do not know much about it and what it offers those who are eligible. Maybe if people knew more about the Death with Dignity Act they would not be so opposed to letting those who actually have to experience the pain and suffering of a terminal illness claim their own life.

With the use of modern-day drugs and strict safeguards, Death with Dignity has been carefully controlled and well thought-out, making it possible to safely and legally hasten death. The states where citizens have tried to pass Death with Dignity laws have put forward measures with the same basic requirements and safeguards, all of which must be affirmed by two licensed physicians. In general, the measures attempted in other states — as well as the one that will likely be before voters in Washington — require that a person be at least 18 years of age or older, be diagnosed as terminally ill and have less than six months to live, according to two licensed physicians. The person must also be completely mentally stable, without any signs or symptoms of depression or mental illness. Such strict requirements mean that the law will be used responsibly and that only those who really and truly need to use — and want to use — the law will be able to do so.

As with any law in our country, the Death with Dignity Act was created to protect an individual’s rights. If this law becomes more widespread, maybe Americans will be able to relinquish some of their many fears about death and dying. Maybe it will open new worlds of freedom for future Americans, questioning what the right to life, to choice and to freedom really means.

Death with Dignity is about giving people who are terminally ill the right under law to claim what is theirs. It is about having the right to live, and then to die, with the comfort of knowing — and proving — that they are in control and that their life is theirs to live, and thus, theirs to end.

— Emma Levant is an eighth- grade student at The

Harbor School.