Brittany Maynard bridesmaids

Newlywed Brittany Maynard was diagnosed with brain cancer earlier this year. She's partnering with nonprofit Compassion & Choices in her final days to advocated for access to physician-assisted suicide in other states.

(Photo by Tara L. Arrowood, provided by Compassion & Choices)

Update: This post has been updated to reflect the correction appended at bottom.

A 29-year-old is making national waves for her decision to spend her final days advocating for expanded access to physician-assisted suicide.

Brittany Maynard, who recently moved to Portland to access Oregon's Death with Dignity Act, is partnering with nonprofit Compassion & Choices to lobby other states to adopt similar legislation.

Brittany Maynard, 29, with her dog shortly before she was diagnosed with brain cancer.

Maynard was diagnosed with brain cancer on New Years Day, according to a video the nonprofit published on YouTube. (We've embedded the video below.) She had been married for just over a year.

In April, doctors identified her tumor as grade four glioblastoma -- a highly malignant, aggressive cancer -- and gave her a prognosis of six months to live.

"There is no treatment that would save my life, and the recommended treatments would have destroyed the time I had left," Maynard wrote in an op-ed for CNN.

Sean Crowley, a spokesperson for Compassion & Choices, said Maynard is only granting interviews to national and Californian media outlets. He declined to make Maynard available for an interview with The Oregonian.

Maynard opted to pursue physician-assisted suicide and moved to Portland from California with her husband and mother, according to the video. Maynard has had the medication for weeks and keeps it in a safe place.

"I am not suicidal," she wrote for CNN. "If I were, I would have consumed that medication long ago. I do not want to die. But I am dying. And I want to die on my own terms."

She has found comfort in the choice, she wrote. Doctors told her she is likely to die slowly because she is young and healthy -- hanging on for weeks or months while a tumor alters her personality and shuts down her verbal, cognitive and motor abilities.

Death with Dignity prescriptions and deaths each year since 1998.

Oregon's Death with Dignity Act was enacted in late 1997. As of the end of 2013, 1,173 people have received lethal prescriptions. Roughly 64 percent have used the medication to die.

Oregon was the first of five states to make death with dignity available. The others are Montana, Washington, New Mexico and Vermont. According to the Death with Dignity National Center, legislators is seven other states have introduced bills.

"My question is: Who has the right to tell me that I don't deserve this choice?" she wrote for CNN. "If you ever find yourself walking a mile in my shoes, I hope that you would at least be given the same choice and that no one tries to take it from you."

See Maynard tell her story in this video from Compassion & Choices:

Correction: An earlier version of this post contained an incorrect calculation of the percentage of people prescribed lethal drugs under the Death with Dignity Act who use the drugs to die.

-- Melissa Binder