Physician-Assisted Suicide — The Worry About Abuse

Abstract

In June 1997, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed decisions in the 9th (Compassion, 1996) and 2nd (Quill, 1996) Federal Circuit Courts of Appeal that had held that state laws prohibiting physician-assisted suicide (PAS) in Washington and New York, respectively, were unconstitutional (U.S. Supreme Court, 1997). The decisions left states free to craft policy on physician-assisted suicide and to prohibit it, as most states now do, or to permit it under one or another regulatory system, as Oregon now does (Oregon, 1995). While I believe there is a plausible constitutional argument that can be, and was, made for a constitutionally protected liberty interest in determining “the time and manner of one’s death,” as the 9th Federal Circuit Court’s opinion put it, the present Supreme Court has made clear that it does not accept any such broad right. Some commentators, as well as more than one of the justices, have interpreted the Court’s decision as leaving open the possibility of accepting a more narrowly framed right to physician-assisted suicide in the future, but for now the principal focus of efforts to secure such a right will return to the states, either through referenda or legislative action, where it had been before the two Circuit Court opinions.

This paper is drawn from my longer paper, ‘A Critique of Three Objections to Physician Assisted Suicide,’ Ethics, 109 (1999) 519–547, and is reprinted here with permission of the University of Chicago Press.