Source: https://e-lib.info/free-euthanasia-essays-assisted-suicide-and-the-s-52312/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 01:43:36+00:00

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The Court upheld two state laws absolutely prohibiting assisted suicide, stating that Washington state’s law does not violate constitutional guarantees of “liberty” (Washington v. Glucksberg) and that New York’s similar law does not violate constitutional guarantees of equal protection (Vacco v. Quill). Oregon’s law selectively permitting assisted suicide for certain patients had been found by one federal district court to violate equal protection; that ruling was not before the Supreme Court. See Lee v. Oregon, 891 F.Supp. 1429 (D. Or. 1995), vacated on other grounds, 107 F.3d 1382 (9th Cir. 1997), cert. denied, 118 S. Ct. 328 (1997). As Chief Justice Rehnquist said in his majority opinion in Glucksberg: “Lee, of course, is not before us… and we offer no opinion as to the validity of the Lee courts’ reasoning. In Vacco v. Quill…, however, decided today, we hold that New York’s assisted-suicide ban does not violate the Equal Protection clause.” Washington v. Glucksberg, 117 S. Ct. 2258, 2262 n. 7 (1997) (emphasis added). To this day no appellate court in the country has ruled on the constitutionality of a law like Oregon’s.
The Court also said nothing about assigning this issue to state as opposed to federal jurisdiction. In reviewing the Nation’s longstanding tradition against assisted suicide, it cited federal enactments such as the Assisted Suicide Funding Restriction Act of 1997 alongside state laws. Illustrating the government’s interest in protecting terminally ill patients, the Court favorably cited an earlier decision upholding the federal Food and Drug Administration’s authority “to protect the terminally ill, no less than other patients,” from life-endangering drugs. Washington v. Glucksberg, 117 S. Ct. at 2272, quoting United States v. Rutherford, 442 U.S. 544, 558 (1979).
The risk of harm is greatest for the many individuals in our society whose autonomy and well-being are already compromised by poverty, lack of access to good medical care, advanced age, or membership in a stigmatized social group.” New York Task Force 120… If physician-assisted suicide were permitted, many might resort to it to spare their families the substantial financial burden of end-of-life health-care costs.
It turns out that what is couched as a limited right to “physician-assisted suicide” is likely, in effect, a much broader license, which could prove extremely difficult to police and contain. Washington’s ban on assisting suicide prevents such erosion.
The distinction comports with fundamental legal principles of causation and intent. First, when a patient refuses life-sustaining medical treatment, he dies from an underlying fatal disease or pathology; but if a patient ingests lethal medication prescribed by a physician, he is killed by that medication….
Furthermore, a physician who withdraws, or honors a patient’s refusal to begin, life-sustaining medical treatment purposefully intends, or may so intend, only to respect his patient’s wishes and “to cease doing useless and futile or degrading things to the patient when the patient no longer stands to benefit from them.” Assisted Suicide in the United States, Hearing before the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the House Committee on the Judiciary, 104th Cong., 2d Sess., 368 (1996) (testimony of Dr. Leon R. Kass). The same is true when a doctor provides aggressive palliative care; in some cases, painkilling drugs may hasten a patient’s death, but the physician’s purpose and intent is, or may be, only to ease his patient’s pain. A doctor who assists a suicide, however, “must, necessarily and indubitably, intend primarily that the patient be made dead.” Id., at 367. Similarly, a patient who commits suicide with a doctor’s aid necessarily has the specific intent to end his or her own life, while a patient who refuses or discontinues treatment might not…. Logic and contemporary practice support New York’s judgment that the two acts are different, and New York may therefore, consistent with the Constitution, treat them differently.

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