California authorizes medical aid in dying. Under the state's End of Life Option Act, a mentally capable adult with a terminal diagnosis can legally request and self-administer medication to end their life on their own terms.
The general eligibility framework
- An adult (18 or older) with the capacity to make their own health care decisions
- Diagnosed with a terminal illness that, in the judgment of the attending physician and a second, independently consulting physician, is expected to result in death within six months
- Able to self-administer the prescribed medication — under every authorizing jurisdiction's law, the choice and the act must be the person's own, not performed by someone else on their behalf
- Required to make more than one request over time (typically both a spoken and a written request), often with a waiting period in between — though the exact number of days, and whether it can be shortened for someone very close to death, varies by state and has changed through recent legislation and litigation in several states
- In most authorizing states, required to be a current resident of that state — Oregon and Vermont are the notable exceptions, having removed their residency requirements after legal challenges
What's specific to California
California's End of Life Option Act was signed into law in 2015 and took effect in June 2016. It's one of the longest-running medical aid-in-dying laws in the country, and the California Department of Public Health publishes annual data on how the law is used. As with every state on this list, exact requirements — including current waiting-period rules, required forms, and any recent amendments — are best confirmed directly with the state rather than assumed from an older source.
For solo agers in particular, this is worth thinking through well before a crisis: the process typically unfolds over days or weeks, not in a single appointment, and usually involves your primary physician, a specialist confirming the diagnosis, and often a hospice or palliative care team. If you don't have a spouse or adult child nearby, make sure whoever holds your health care proxy and anyone on your care team knows your wishes ahead of time — and that your state-specific paperwork, once completed, is stored somewhere they can actually find it.