Ala. Code §22-8A-4 · Alabama
Alabama: how to sign your advance directive
Alabama puts the living will and the health care proxy in one instrument — the Advance Directive for Health Care — under a chapter titled Termination of Life-Support Procedures. §22-8A-4(b) creates both functions in one document, and a durable power of attorney executed under the Alabama Durable Power of Attorney Act (§26-1-2) is treated as a proxy for this chapter.
Why WearableDocs
In Alabama, a signed directive in a drawer is not enough
The statute makes delivery — or getting the document into the medical record — part of what switches the directive on. A relative who might know which drawer is not a plan. WearableDocs stores the document you signed and puts it on a page that opens when someone scans your card, so the person who needs it can build the record while there is still time.
You answer a few questions — your name, your state, and what you refuse — and WearableDocs builds the directive. Print it, sign it, upload it. Changing your answers later is part of the plan, so nothing is locked in.
What Alabama asks
What you need to sign in Alabama
- Instruments
- One Advance Directive for Health Care — living will and health care proxy combined
- Form
- Illustrative — a statutory form is provided
- Execution
- Two witnesses or more, age 19, no notary
- May not witness
- Your proxy; whoever signed on your behalf; relatives by blood, adoption or marriage; estate beneficiaries and intestate heirs; whoever is financially responsible for you
- May not be your agent
- A health care provider, or a non-relative employee of one
- Copy rule
- None found
- Delivery
- A duty on you — the declarant must give a copy to the physician
- Registry
- None
- Age
- 19 — not 18
- Carried device
- Nothing for the directive
- Citation
- Ala. Code §22-8A-4 — secondary host
Read from the enacted statute, NONE — sec.
The instrument
What Alabama actually recognizes
The age is the thing almost everyone gets wrong. Alabama's threshold is 19, not 18. A 19-year-old Alabamian is the youngest person in most of the country who can sign a binding directive; an 18-year-old in Alabama cannot.
Alabama also places the delivery duty on you directly: the declarant must give a copy to the physician.
What the popular guides get wrong
Corrections for Alabama
"You can sign an advance directive at 18." In Alabama the age is 19. A nationally-produced form that says 18 is wrong here, and the error is invisible on the page.
Carried on you
What a WearableDocs card does in Alabama
WearableDocs is how your Alabama advance directive gets found. There is no device provision, no bracelet statute, and no copy-equivalence rule.
Alabama does put a delivery duty on the declarant — you must give the physician a copy — which makes Alabama one of the states where the document's movement is the signer's responsibility rather than the provider's. That is the findability case, stated by the statute rather than implied by it.