Assisted suicide win at Supreme Court suggests doctors’ changing role
- Jan 13, 2006 - comment
The U.S. Supreme Court’s Jan. 17 ruling that the federal government cannot bar Oregon doctors from prescribing lethal amounts of drugs for people seeking to commit suicide is another dangerous step in the wrong direction, said Richard Land, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
“This ruling is clear evidence that there is a struggle of life and death proportions between two remarkably disparate and contradictory worldviews in America,” Land said, explaining one viewpoint esteems the preciousness of life and the other seeks to judge its value on a case-by-case basis.
In a 6-3 vote, the justices sided with the state of Oregon, which argued its right to regulate medicine trumps the federal government’s authority to control drug usage in regards to physician-assisted suicide. Assisted suicide, which involves a physician prescribing but not administering a drug to take a person’s life, became legal in Oregon in 1997. Oregon remains the only state to legalize the act. Through 2004, the state had reported 208 deaths by assisted suicide.
“This is one more example of American society flirting with the idea of skiing down a steep and slippery slope to a dark and dangerous place where physicians become administrators of death and not healing,” Land warned.
The question before the high court in Gonzales v. Oregon was not whether assisted suicide is legal but whether the Department of Justice acted within its authority when it banned the use of federally controlled drugs in such lethal actions. In 2001, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft barred the use of drugs regulated by the federal Controlled Substances Act in doctor-assisted suicides. Ashcroft said assisted suicide “is not a ‘legitimate medical purpose’” under the federal law.
Writing for the majority, Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy said Ashcroft went beyond his authority in his order.
“If the attorney general’s argument were correct,” Kennedy wrote, “his power to deregister [doctors] necessarily would include the greater power to criminalize even the actions of registered physicians, whenever they engage in conduct he deems illegitimate. This power to criminalize would be unrestrained.”
“It is sad that a majority of the current court prefers to see this issue in purely federal vs. state terms as opposed to the profound moral issue of involving the healing arts in death therapy — the therapy or treatment for an illness being death by a doctor’s prescription,” Land continued.
Associate Justice Antonin Scalia said in a dissenting opinion Congress had given the attorney general such authority. He also rejected the majority’s understanding of “legitimate medical purpose.”
“If the term ‘legitimate medical purpose’ has any meaning, it surely excludes the prescription of drugs to produce death,” Scalia wrote.
New Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Clarence Thomas joined Scalia in the dissent.