MassInsider

Press Release: 3/9/2026

I am a strong supporter of legislation to create end-of-life options, also referred to as “compassionate choices.” I recently spoke to the issue in an “ask me anything” town hall setting. Here is my lightly-edited 2 minute statement on the legislation.

Transcript (lightly edited):

Compassionate Choices. Yeah. Giving people the ability to choose to end their life when they are already terminally ill and facing certain death in a relatively short period of time and they want to avoid the pain.

That’s something that, is a very personal issue for me. It’s something that my father worked hard on, when he was alive. He, mercifully died, in his sleep and did not suffer. But, my mother had a course of illness that really could have led to suffering, although it was mercifully swift. She had pancreatic cancer and she died. Once she felt bad, it was really a very swift thing.

But there are people whose terminal illness, and we all have a terminal something, is very, very painful and scary. And, giving people the option — this is the way my father put it, and he was somebody who had worked a lot in hospice: people are not afraid of death; they’re afraid of pain — and giving people the option to break the glass and exit at a certain point, if the pain gets too bad, is something that they almost never use. They rarely use it. But knowing that they have it, gives them a lot of comfort. It eliminates their fear in the final days and those final months and weeks when, they don’t have any good prospects and they only have bad prospects, but you can take away some of the fear. So that’s something that I’ve personally worked hard on for a few years. It was on the ballot about 10, 12 years ago, did not pass. and we’ve been trying to build consensus to move it forward, over the past few years, not so far successfully.

Audience Member Keep up the good work on that one, please.

Yep. it’s, on my very short list of things that I want to, that I’m constantly trying to find a way through on.