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“I strongly support Brittany Maynard’s impassioned efforts to expand everyone’s access to physician-assisted suicide. It is tragic that she died so young, but her life has made an important contribution to us all,” writes Professor Ronald Green in a CNN opinion piece about the death of Maynard, a 29-year-old who’d been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer.

Green says he is adamantly opposed to physicians “ever becoming agents of death.” However, he says, in the case of physician-assisted suicide, doctors are not actively involved.

“In jurisdictions where physician-assisted suicide is permitted and where proper safeguards are in place to prevent depressed or otherwise ineligible people from access to lethal drugs, physicians play a standard medical role of ascertaining applicants’ eligibility for the appropriate medications. Then the physicians get out of the way,” Green writes.

Green is a professor of religion, the Eunice and Julian Cohen Professor for the Study of Ethics and Human Values, director of Dartmouth’s Institute for the Study of Applied and Professional Ethics, and a professor of community and family medicine at the Geisel School of Medicine.

Read the full opinion piece, published 11/3/14 by CNN.