Barbara Coombs Lee, PA, FNP, JD

President, Compassion & Choices

Barbara Coombs Lee is president of Compassion & Choices, the nation’s oldest and largest nonprofit organization working to improve care and expand choice at the end of life. This follows a 25-year career as a nurse and physician assistant, during which she often cared for terminally ill patients. She attended many patients who had good deaths and may who suffered through fruitless and painful procedures and prolonged stays in intensive care. As an ER and ICU nurse she performed many painful and pointless interventions on dying patients.

Those experiences inspired her to begin a career in law and health policy and devote her professional life to individual choice and empowerment in healthcare. Becoming a private attorney, she championed initiatives that would allow individuals to consider a full range of choices and be full participants in their healthcare decisions.

During Ms. Coombs Lee’s subsequent tenure as President of Compassion in Dying and then of Compassion & Choices, the end-of-life choice movement has achieved many milestones. She was instrumental in securing the passage of Oregon’s landmark Death with Dignity law in 1997. In 2008, she was a senior advisor for the Washington state Death with Dignity referendum that voters approved by an 18-point margin, thereby becoming the second state to legalize aid in dying. In 2009, Compassion and Choices won a landmark case in the Montana Supreme Court (Baxter v. Montana) that it is not against the state’s public policy for a physician to provide aid in dying to a mentally competent, terminally ill adult. Compassion & Choices then defeated bills in Montana in 2011 to void this state Supreme Court ruling and again in 2013 to try to imprison doctors for providing aid in dying. Compassion and Choices continues to pursue legislative and legal activity in many other states to try to gain better care and greater freedom of choice for people in the final stages of life.

Ms. Coombs Lee has appeared on many of the nation’s leading media outlets, including Bloomberg News, The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, NPR’s All Things Considered, The NPR-syndicated Diane Rehm Show, NBC News, CNN’s Crossfire, CBS’ 60 Minutes, PBS’ The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, The Today Show, On Our Own Terms: Moyers on Dying and The Dr. Oz Show.