THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, January 10, 1997 TAG: 9701100011
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A12 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 86 lines
Two cases argued together before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday are literally matters of life and death.
Federal appeals courts struck down laws in Washington and New York that prohibit doctors from assisting terminally ill patients to commit suicide. Now the Supreme Court will decide the issue.
Anyone who has watched a terminally-ill loved one die by agonizing degrees must have paused to consider the implications of the arguments. Quill vs. Vacco and Compassion in Dying vs. State of Washington may be the most socially significant cases the court has considered since Roe vs. Wade created the continually controversial right to abortion in 1973.
To laymen the issue is simple: Does a terminally ill patient have the constitutional right to a doctor's assistance in committing suicide after deciding that life is not worth living?
To this we say no.
New York Attorney General Dennis C. Vacco, who before the court for his state, put it succinctly: ``The state has the right to regulate the intentional killing of its citizens, particularly at a vulnerable time of their lives. We believe the state has a legitimate and compelling interest in protecting these people.''
Those who support the right to assisted suicide argue that terminally ill, mentally competent adults have a right to decide when they have suffered enough.
Lawyers for their side argue that because courts have established a right of patients to refuse medical treatment to prolong life, it is only fair that those who want to hasten death by having their doctors help kill them be granted that right too.
But there's a world of difference between passively withholding further treatment and actively participating in the ending of a life. As we wait for the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, the country is perched at the precipice of the proverbial slippery slope.
In the unlikely event the court decides there is a constitutionally protected right to die for the terminally ill, how long will it be before the courts are clogged with cases asking that this newly discovered right be extended to those not in the final days of life?
How long before those suffering from debilitating conditions like multiple sclerosis or paralyzing spinal injuries argue that they, too, have a right to die because their quality of life is diminished?
Let's not forget depressed and unhappy Americans. Won't they want the same constitutional right as the terminally ill to have a doctor help kill them?
The question of defining a terminal illness promises to prove every bit as problematical as defining obscenity. The old, ``we know it when we see it'' standard is very difficult to litigate. Terminal illness is, after all, a medical, not a legal, concept, and an imprecise one at that. It can differ from doctor to doctor.
How would courts cope with diseases that are ``terminal'' today but may be curable tomorrow? A short time ago, every AIDS patient in America could have been considered terminally ill. Today, thanks to the new protease inhibitors, many AIDS patients have a much brighter future. Many, in fact, say they are now suffering from a chronic ailment rather than terminal disease.
Friends-of-the-court briefs have been arriving by the truckload in Washington on both sides on this issue. It is worth noting that the American Medical Association has submitted one asking the court not to create a right to die. The AMA argues that physician-assisted suicide is ``incompatible '' with the role of doctors and violates their Hippocratic Oath.
Jim Towey, director of the Florida Commission on Aging with Dignity, also argues against the creation of this right. He worries that the right to die would pressure the very poor and the very old into suicide to spare exhausted and impoverished relatives from accompanying them on a long journey to death.
``It starts off as a right to die, and then it becomes a duty to die,'' Towey says.
One of the most moving arguments against the so-called right to die was made in a letter to the U.S. Supreme Court by the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin of Chicago, shortly before his death from cancer last year.
``Creating a new `right' to assisted suicide will endanger society and send a false signal that a less than `perfect' life is not worth living,'' the cleric worried from his own deathbed.
For these reasons and a host of others, we hope the U.S. Supreme Court will not recognize a constitutional right to doctor-assisted death, but that the ethics of such actions will continue to be part of a spirited public discussion of the issue.
Justice David H. Souter suggested on Wednesday that the court might leave in place state laws banning doctor-assisted suicide because ``as an institution we are not in a position to make the judgment now that you want us to make.''
A society perched at the precipice should hope the full court follows Souter's logic.