A May 2013 Huffington Post and YouGov poll found that 50 percent of Americans think physician-assisted suicide should be legal, while 29 percent think it should be illegal.

Courts in Montana will reconsider the state’s current lack of rulings on physician-assisted suicides, explains a Billings Gazette story published June 12, 2013. In 2009, the Supreme Court of Montana stated that nothing prevented physician-assisted suicides from being legal, but did not say clearly whether they are or not.

H. Tristram Engelhardt Jr. is a philosophy professor at Rice University in Houston and an expert on bioethics. His current research interests include rights and responsibilities in health care.

B. Andrew Lustig is the Holmes Rolston III Professor of Religion and Science at Davidson College in Davidson, N.C. His specialties include bioethics and religion and science. He was staff ethicist for then-Gov. Mario Cuomo’s New York State Task Force on Life and the Law.

George P. Smith II is a law professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. His specialty is bioethics and health law; he has taught internationally.

Dr. Kirtly Parker Jones is a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Utah Medical School in Salt Lake City. She teaches the ethics of reproductive medicine.

Nazarene Compassionate Ministries in Kansas City, Mo., is a faith-based organization that provides abstinence and faithfulness programs and other AIDS services in Africa under a government contract.

C. Ben Mitchell is director of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, in Bannockburn, Ill., and associate professor of bioethics and contemporary culture at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Ill. He is editor of the journal Ethics & Medicine: An International Journal of Bioethics.

This story, published on May 14, 2013, in the New York Times, explains how Vermont became the first state to pass a legislative measure allowing physicians to administer lethal drugs to terminally ill patients in May 2013.