An appeals court's ruling a few days ago that the terminally ill have a right to a "dignified and humane death" is indisputable. But the court went too far when it extended that argument to legitimize doctor-assisted suicide.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in striking down a Washington state law banning such forms of suicide, has opened the door for those who seek to justify ending another person's life.Thirty-three states have laws forbidding doctor-assisted suicide. Are we really to believe that a circuit court knows best?
While a dying person has every right to refuse life-sustaining medical treatment, especially devices that keep the patient technically alive but unable to function, it is quite another matter to give a doctor the right to take that person's life.
If life is no longer considered sacred, many more questions would arise about who can decide to end it and when. Who decides competency of a patient? If the patient cannot express the wish to die, can others assume what those wishes would be? How early in the progress of a disease can death be termed inevitable? What about dying children?
There is a reason doctors take an oath to protect and preserve life. Their code does not allow them to take action to cause a death. The skills they use to sustain life can as easily be used to end life. Giving them the legal power to do both makes it too easy to misuse that power to further interests other than the patient's.
Assisting suicide could become a medical specialty, as it has for Dr. Jack Kevorkian. An autopsy of a woman who died with help from Kevorkian in November showed no traces of the cancer with which she supposedly was terminally ill. Such incidents could become all too common if assisted suicide were the norm.
Certainly there are cases of people suffering from extremely painful diseases with no hope of recovery. But as welcome as death might be for them, it must not become the right of doctors to cause it. In those cases, ending medical treatment other than pain relief may be enough to hasten a merciful death.
In any event, court intrusion into this matter is arrogant and dangerous. This week's misguided ruling needs to be appealed and overturned.