A US woman with brain cancer has ended her life by swallowing lethal drugs made available to her under a law in the state of Oregon which allows terminally ill people to choose when they want to die.
Brittany Maynard would have been 30 on November 19th.
She has been in the spotlight for about a month after publicizing that she and her husband moved to Portland from Northern California so that she could take advantage of Oregon's Death with Dignity Law.
Ahead of her suicide, she told journalists she planned to die on November 1st, shortly after her husband's birthday.
"So if November 2nd comes along and I've passed, I hope my family is still proud of me in the choices I made. When people criticize me for not waiting longer, or whatever they've decided is best for me, it hurts because really I risk it every day."
Maynard's case has revived a national debate in the US about physician-assisted suicide.
Oregon is the first US state to make it legal for a doctor to prescribe a life-ending drug to a terminally ill patient if they're deemed to be of sound mind.
As of last year, around 750 people in the state of Oregon used the law to die.
