* Background, including what’s in the bill, is here if you need it. The governor was asked about his recent signing of the Medical Aid in Dying bill…

First, it’s a very difficult issue. Frankly, I heard from a lot of people on both sides of this.

I will say I think the vast majority of people have seemed to have favored giving people who are in the end of their life a choice, and that is what this bill is about. It’s about giving people their individual choice.

But I also understand that for some people, it’s part of a religious moral issue around their faith. And I listen to that because I know how important that is. In the end, I particularly heard from people who are in the last six months of their lives, who are suffering, and I also heard from people who have had their relative or friend to go through it, and that they’ve gone through it with them.

And I think again, I could have gone either way on this, just on the issue of compassion, about thinking about what the right thing to do is.

It’s very difficult, but in the end, I felt like giving people a choice in these very limited circumstances. We don’t want to broaden this and make this something that’s, you know, broad based, available to people who just decide on their own.

This is something, deciding when you’re in pain and at the end of your life, I just felt in the end that the stories that I heard, the introspection that I did about what I would think for myself or for my family members, that you know, that helped to guide me to the to the conclusion.

* Did he discuss the bill during his recent meeting with the Pope?…

We didn’t. We really didn’t. I mean, somebody asked me about, we didn’t discuss it.

It was literally mentioned in a list of things, as we were speaking at the beginning of … literally in a list of things that they we were both dismissing, things that we could imagine that we might disagree about being from two different religions, or, you know, having different different upbringings. Literally a dismissal of issues that we wouldn’t be talking about those things. And instead, we ended up talking a large to a large degree about humanitarian issues, like what’s happening in immigration across the world, but especially here in the United States.