Today a committee of Washington, DC’s state council is likely to vote for a doctor-assisted-dying law. If a full council vote is also in favour, as expected, the proposal will go to the city’s mayor, Muriel Bowser. Supporters hope she will be as bold as California’s governor, Jerry Brown, who signed doctor-assisted dying into state law last year, despite his Catholic faith. A similar measure will be debated by Michigan’s lawmakers in January. Such proposals will get a boost if the American Medical Association drops its longstanding opposition to doctor-assisted dying. This now looks possible. In June the AMA said it would revisit the issue, recognising that public opinion favours legalisation and that some states have allowed it for long enough to see how laws function in practice. Washington state, for example, has allowed doctor-assisted dying since 2009; it recently published figures showing that just 213 prescriptions for lethal medication were issued in 2015.