Student Activity Guide
A toolkit for students to support educational and/or advocacy
projects around end-of-life choice and death with dignity.
Why end-of-life choice?
This guide
offers suggestions for activities and projects
you might do on campus, from both an academic and
advocacy perspective.
For comprehensive information
about end-of-life choice, aid in dying, and other care
options, please see our downloadable
Backgrounder on
Death with Dignity
.
There are many current social issues for students interested in
public affairs to choose from, and end-of-life choice may be a
less common topic of interest for younger people, for whom the
end of life feels a long way off.
End of life choice is a
fundamental civil rights issue, which directly addresses the role
and scope of government in our lives, and other important
policy questions for the complicated and costly healthcare
system here in the U.S.
The issue: How should we die?
Spending one’s final days in an ICU. because of terminal illness is for most people a kind of failure. You lie on a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place. The end comes with no chance for you to have said goodbye or “It’s O.K.” or “I’m sorry” or “I love you.”
– Atul Gawande, The New Yorker
Approximately 2.5 million people die each year in the United States. Of those, 1.5 million were diagnosed with terminal illnesses. Nearly 70 percent of us will spend our final days in hospitals, nursing homes or hospice, where important decisions must be made about treatment in the final stage of our lives. Yet dying, and preparing for it, rarely appears in public or even private conversations in our communities.
Medical advances have prolonged the quantity of our days, but not necessarily their quality. More people than ever before spend their final hours incoherent, sustained by pain medication and machines, and away from home—often against their wishes.
Many Americans are divided over what they see as a choice between costly medical interventions near the end of life and providing a legal means for the terminally ill to end their own suffering on their own terms. We face a modern dilemma: How should we die when there are so many ways to postpone death?
The medical profession is also conflicted about how best to respond to terminal illness and end-of-life care. The doctor’s oath, when interpreted through the most conservative lens, prohibits helping someone end his or her own life. Yet there is a growing consensus among physicians and other care providers around the need for more and better options. These may include more education for patients and caregivers, and financial incentives for health care providers to offer information and counseling for their patients who are, in fact, dying.
.
Advocacy and campaign activities
There are many simple ways to get involved and make a contribution to an important social movement. Depending on your location, there may be Compassion & Choices staff and programming near you! But even if there isn’t, here are some suggestions for activities you can do on your own.
Additional information and step-by-step instructions for many of these activities are located in our Volunteer Action Center on our website.
On-campus tabling: Setting up a table in a high-traffic spot on campus is a tried-and-true way to educate your peers about important issues. You can offer background materials on Compassion & Choices, information on advance health care directives, encourage people to sign up for our newsletter and even sign a petition. See the Canvassing/Tabling Guide for more details.
Write an op-ed piece for your campus newspaper: This can be a great project, which can double as a class assignment or extra-credit project. Review Compassion & Choices’ Website for the latest information, and draft and submit your letter according to the published guidelines of your school paper. See the Letter Writing Guide for more details.
Write a letter to your state representatives. And get 25 others to write them too! You can even have some paper and envelopes at your table or your brown bag lunch (see below), and invite everyone to write a letter. One page, hand written is sufficient. There is no magic language. Just tell your lawmaker your opinion and why. See the Letter Writing Guide for more detailed instructions.
Brown-bag lunch! One of the best ways to learn about a new issue is to talk about it. Invite a few friends to join you for a brown bag lunch on campus, and set aside one hour to talk about end-of-life choice and death with dignity, and consider doing an activity like letter writing or petition signing. You can refer to discussion materials from the “How to Die in Oregon” Screening Guide.
Student Activity Guide p. 3
Advocacy Projects:
Academic and educational projects
End-of-life choice and death with dignity are important social issues worthy of study, and would make a great topic for a term paper, presentation or other project for a wide range of classes. Everything from political science, civil rights and public administration, to psychology, sociology or anthropology. And of course, professional programs in medicine, nursing, social work or law are always a great fit.
Comprehensive background information on the issues, including a historical timeline, are available in our downloadable Backgrounder on Death With Dignity.
1. Research paper: Writing research papers is a great way to get an in-depth look at the conversation around end of life issues. And since you’ll be writing them anyway, why not focus on a topic of real importance right now? Compassion & Choice website is replete with information, data and important tools to help you in your research.
2. Conference poster or class presentation. If you have the opportunity to do a more formal presentation as part of a class or a conference, consider end-of-life choice and the medical and legal ethics questions that are at issue as an engaging subject for your audience. You can begin with your state (what is the current authorized status of aid in dying) and also look at the “Oregon model” as a comparison, which is detailed in the Backgrounder on Death With Dignity.
3. Write a feature story about end-of-life choice for your campus newspaper. A feature story is different from an op-ed in that you keep your opinions to yourself and focus on aspects of the issue from an informational perspective. You can look in the local and national media for examples of end-of-life stories that have made the news elsewhere, and point out why even college students (some with aging parents or grandparents) should be concerned about this issue. Reach out to your school paper’s editor to
pitch your idea, and use resources on CompassionAndChoices.org to source your story.
Student Activity Guide p. 4
Educational Projects:
Internships: Depending upon your location, and proximity to a C&C office, a formal internship with Compassion & Choices may be possible. Contact C&C for more
Current video assets
Compassion & Choices has a variety of educational and advocacy
videos available for use.
Whether you are watching by yourself to
learn more or using these as tools to educate others, you can find
shorter pieces on our YouTube channel, and for longer, more
in-depth pieces, DVDs may be available for free*.
1. YouTube Channel
2. Barbara Mancini Presentation Video*
3. How to Die in Oregon
*
4. Compassion & Choices “Overview”
& “Campaign Videos”
Three ways to
use videos:
1. Share your favorite videos
from our YouTube channel on
social media (see our social
media toolkit for specific suggestions).
2. Do a screening event on
campus, in a classroom or in a meeting room featuring one of our longer format programs; hold a discussion afterward and note the results.
3. Plan a movie night at home with your friends, family or classmates, and view the programs in a less formal setting. Ask everyone to write one page of comments about the films and the issue, and use those as the basis for an article in your school paper or a letter to the editor in a
community paper.
4. Ask permission to show one of the shorter videos in class, and have a discussion.
Student Activity Guide p.5
How to Die in Oregon
Barbara Mancini
Questions for further thought
It can be difficult to get your head around a new and complex
issue like end-of-life choice.
And one of the best ways to learn is
by discussing the issues with your peers. Whether in a formal
setting like a class or presentation, or an informal one like the
brown-bag lunch we recommend, it can be helpful to have a few
questions at the ready to keep the conversation going.
Discussion
• Have you ever done any thinking about your own death and how you want it to go?
• Does everyone have a good understanding of what we mean when we say “aid in dying” and “death with dignity?”
• Why do many doctors continue to believe that aid-in-dying violates their oath as physicians?
Paper or Presentation Topics
• Where is the line between a caring government protecting (us from harm) and an intrusive one limiting our
rights?
• What is the current law in your state? Have there been discussions about enacting death with dignity
legislation? If not, should there be? • What are the pros and cons of aid in
dying? How do you weigh them appropriately? Who should decide?
