Our September monthly meeting consisted of speakers regarding end of life options.
Dying with Dignity & Final Exit are two different groups who take very different approaches to the same issue.
Dying with Dignity:
Lisa Vigil Schattinger, MSN, RN
Ohio End of Life Options, Executive Director
Lisa Vigil Schattinger is founder and executive director of Ohio End of Life Options, a newly formed non-profit organization focused on furthering educational efforts about Physician-Assisted Dying laws in Ohio. Ohio End of Life Options was granted its 501(c)(3), non-profit status in March 2015.
Vigil Schattinger joined the board of the national organization, Death with Dignity National Center, in April.
After working as an RN at University Hospitals MacDonald Women’s Hospital and Women’s Health Nurse Practitioner at Planned Parenthood, Vigil Schattinger has become an advocate for responsible conversations about end of life options following her stepfather’s, Dr. Jack Rowe, use in November 2014 of Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act.
Her experience as a remote caregiver for her 96-year-old grandmother, in addition to her thoughts on the value of Physician-Assisted Dying, have led her to publish Op-Ed articles in Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio as well as Oregon and Arizona.
Vigil Schattinger has been interviewed about Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act on The Sound of Ideas, 90.3 WCPN ideastream, Northeast Ohio’s NPR’s affiliate station. In addition to presenting/speaking before many community organizations, she has also been a presenter at the Association of Health Care Journalists’ annual conference (held in Cleveland) this April and the Mayo Clinic’s National Hematology/Oncology Review Course in July.
Vigil Schattinger earned her BS in Biology at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon and her MSN specializing in Women’s Health at the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University.
Final Exit
Final Exit Network is a registered non profit organization that operates throughout the United States. We believe in death with dignity and an individual’s right to self determination. We are the only organization that publicly provides education on all end of life choices as well as a compassionate presence to those who are suffering from incurable diseases and have chosen to end their suffering. We do not put an artificial requirement for an individual to be certified as likely to die in six months. Suffering does not recognize that restriction and neither do we.
Robert Rivas
is a member of Sachs Sax & Caplan, a law firm based in Palm Beach County. He is in the Tallahassee office of the firm.
Before entering law school, Mr. Rivas was a reporter for The Miami Herald, a Peace Corps volunteer, a foreign correspondent in Central America and the Caribbean, and the deputy metro editor of The Palm Beach Post. He entered Nova law school in 1988 and graduated summa cum laude in 1991. As a lawyer, Mr. Rivas has concentrated in First Amendment-related law for media and non-media, general civil litigation and appeals.
He first became involved in the Death-With-Dignity movement in 1996 as counsel in a joint ACLU-Hemlock Society project that led to a landmark Florida physician-aid-in-dying case, McIver v. Krischer. More recently, as general counsel to Final Exit Network, he has overseen the defense of the Network and its Exit Guides in civil and criminal cases in Arizona, Georgia, and Minnesota, along with spinoff investigations all across the country. He has engaged and overseen at least 24 other attorneys in the process.
He has secured rulings from the supreme courts of Georgia and Minnesota that their state laws against “assisting in a suicide” were unconstitutional under the First Amendment.
