Imagine being told you only have six months to live. On top of that, you are told by your doctors your last six months will be filled with pain and suffering. They assure you they can keep your body alive, but at what cost?

Medical aid in dying is a medical practice that allows terminally ill, mentally competent adults to request a prescription from their doctor they can self-ingest to die peacefully. Medical aid in dying is a highly contested topic in the bioethics sphere, making it difficult to have a strong opinion without the proper education to back it up.

That being said, it doesn’t have to be an exclusive and polarizing subject.

Medical aid in dying grants autonomy and compassion to individuals in their final stages, enhances end-of-life care and costs states almost nothing to implement. 

Despite concerns about the potential abuse of assisted-death legislation, numerous measures are implemented to protect the vulnerable and prevent exploitation. A patient can change their mind at any time and the attending physician must offer them a chance to rescind their request. 

There are also safeguards for physicians who feel that this practice isn’t something that fits with their morals. Physicians can opt out of providing that care, but that shouldn’t be the end of the conversation. Patients deserve the same rights over their care, including the right to die on their own terms. 

“Sometimes the easiest way to know what’s right or wrong is whether or not it fits in with a particularly meaningful story,” said Joel Wu, clinical ethics assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Bioethics. “The idea is that our lives are our stories, and we want to be able to write our stories on our terms. That should include the ending – I get a terminal diagnosis, [and] it would be really tragic for me to lose control of my story. Especially if it’s the last chapter.”

When a person is given a terminal diagnosis but somehow lives longer than the expected time, people are quick to point out the miracle. It is rare for people to ponder how that extension affected a person as a whole, not just their body. Medical practices can be intrusive and draining. Forcing someone to endure when they want to leave on their own terms can be cruel in its own right. 

Switzerland was the first country to legalize assisted-death medical care, with only 10 other countries following suit. In the United States, there are 10 states (plus the District Of Columbia) where medical aid in dying is legal. 

Medical aid in dying is not a new concept, but it isn’t popular either. While these changes can be seen as a sign of progress, they have seen pushback in recent years. Some disability groups in California felt the End-of-Life Option Act discriminated against them, which led the groups to sue. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit felt they were being steered in a certain direction rather than getting their actual issues addressed.

Seeing this system being abused is a scary thought. Though there is potential for malpractice, with the right safeguards, those problems could be avoided while still offering a path free of suffering. 

Minnesota lawmakers introduced bills in 2015 in both the Senate and the House that would implement compassionate care for terminally ill patients for the first time. The bill received a discussion-only hearing with the bill sponsor, Senator Chris Eaton (DFL), who eventually withdrew the bill from consideration due to insufficient legislative support. 

The most recent state bill addressing medical aid in dying, the End-of-Life Option Act, was proposed in 2023 in the Senate with a companion bill in the House. The act was referred to the Health and Human Services Committee by the Senate and to the Health Finance and Policy Committee by the House. While each committee is expected to conduct a report, chances are they never will and the bill will die in the process. 

There is still time to get involved, and this bill is worth fighting for. Everyone deserves to have power and control of their own body. While the discussion is multi-faceted, it boils down to allowing a person to have a choice. It’s not possible for everyone to agree with each other, but it is possible to allow someone to maintain medical autonomy, even if you disagree with it.

Repatriation and reparations: two pills the Western world refuses to swallow. By refusing to return artifacts that don’t belong to them, western institutions continue to perpetrate the sins of their ancestors.

Stolen artifacts are spoils of war, taken to enforce submission and paraded to prove dominance. Museums present the past to the public, but whose version of the past is being presented? 

Repatriation of artifacts involves the act of returning cultural, historical and archaeological objects to their country of origin or the communities they rightfully belong to.

However, recent indigenous scholars have noted the term rematriation is a better label to use since it means returning to a way of life. It makes the process less procedural and more culturally sensitive.

There is little to no enforcement of this process on the international scale, but within the U.S. there is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA).

Passed in 1990, NAGPRA provides for the repatriation of Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony. This law holds museums and federally funded institutions accountable but has no regulation for private landowners or privately funded institutions.  

It is also worth noting the U.S. only has repatriation legislation for Native Americans and not for any other racial or ethnic group.

Reparations involve taking action to compensate for previous harm or injustice. There is currently no federal legislation that provides reparations for any group, but the progress being made in the name of repatriation should ideally lead to some change.

The British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art –– two world-renowned museums –– are among those who have come under fire in recent news for their dubious dealings. 

A report conducted by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) found the Met Museum has more than 1,000 objects in its collection tied to people with alleged crimes related to the antiquities trade. Authorities seized 29 items from the Met in 2022, citing looting. They found plates, helmets, and statues from all over the world as well as Greek busts and Egyptian bronzes in their acquisition from the museum. 

The British Museum, however, has no qualms about their stance on not returning objects. Protected by the British Museum Act of 1963 and the National Heritage Act of 1983, the museum can retain their stolen items and instead loan them to the countries they are originally from. The U.K. government itself has no plans to amend these laws, showing their firm belief in the philosophy of finders-keepers.

Old habits die hard. 

The British Museum capitalizes on their war spoils, providing the public with their interpretation of history rather than detailing the dark histories of the items’ acquisition. The most notable artifacts on their display would be the Benin Bronzes.

Britain launched an expedition with 5,000 troops and 1,200 naval soldiers in 1897 and completely ravaged the country of Benin, in Africa, ultimately burning it to the ground. They stole around 3,000 artifacts from the country and were then celebrated for their feat in the papers. 

Repatriation is a necessary step to heal from the traumas induced by colonial entities, but the precedent being set by the U.K. and its institutions goes to show that this fight is far from over. Continuing to hold hostage stolen artifacts of great cultural significance is just another form of colonialism. 

“The way we think about human evolution as being a kind of global history that justified the collection of human remains and research on them in ways that not everyone is on board with, get masked and labeled in that museum context which is meant to engender this sense of ‘Well, this belongs to all of us,’”  said Katherine Hayes, Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Minnesota. “At least for a largely white, Western European or American audience.”

However, there is hope on the horizon. 

The Weisman Art Museum is a local example of a museum putting their money where their mouth is.

“We are giving it all back,” said Alejandra Peña-Gutiérrez, director of the Weisman art museum, speaking about her and her team’s efforts to right the wrongs of the past.

But this process takes time. Many tribes have a claim to the items that were found in the New Mexico dig and there are complex processes the tribes must follow before the artifacts can be returned. For Peña-Gutiérrez, witnessing the emotional side of the repatriation process has been incredibly moving. 

“I just feel so bad about how we’ve treated the tribes and how this didn’t happen before,” Peña-Gutiérrez said. “I feel that we, as a system, have never seen them as people with feelings and emotions.” 

Peña-Gutiérrez plans to continue to rebuild the relationships with the Native American tribes and ensure that the voices being amplified are from the right perspective. 

While the University has begun the process of building relationships with Native communities, Hayes says there is still much more to be done. 

“President [Joan] Gabel was the first president to really come in and start to try to build a relationship with the tribal nations in the state,” Hayes said. “It remains to be seen if subsequent leadership actually continues that effort.”

With a firm step in the right direction, the University must ensure that whoever takes over after Gabel will continue to strengthen these ties and work to repair what has been broken by previous leadership. 

Large institutions need to rise to the occasion and set a new standard rather than defaulting to those set by their predecessors.