SCOTUS Upholds Oregon’s Euthanasia Law

The Supreme Court of the United States has upheld the right of terminally-ill residents of the state of Oregon to depart this life with dignity and without pain. In a 6-3 decision, the court decided that states, not the federal government, have the right to set their own rules on this issue. Not bad for a court that decided 5-4 that Florida didn’t have the right to count its own ballots in its own way in 2000.

Twice, the voters of Oregon have approved the state’s Death with Dignity Act. Under this law, a terminally ill patient must get certification from two doctors that he is of sound mind and has less than six months to live. Once that requirement is met, a doctor may prescribe a lethal dose of pharmaceuticals which the patient, not the doctor, administers. Since 1997, about 200 people in Oregon have chosen this method of finding eternity.

Alleged Christian and former Attorney General John Ashcroft decided that he knew better than patients and doctors. He vowed to override the will of people 3,000 miles away from Washington in 2001, and used the provisions of the Controlled Substances Act (which has created drug mafias around the world) to get the job done. The CSA requires drugs to be dispensed for a “legitimate medical purpose.” Supporting Mr. Ashcroft, Justice Scalia in dissent wrote, “If the term ‘legitimate medical purpose’ has any meaning, it surely excludes the prescription of drugs to produce death.” When death is inevitable, though, a lethal dose can diminish the spiritual and physical suffering of the patient, something even a judge should understand.

The majority, however, decided that lawyer Ashcroft was not medically qualified to argue with practicing physicians in Oregon. Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy stated, “In the face of the CSA's silence on the practice of medicine generally and its recognition of state regulation of the medical profession, it is difficult to defend the Attorney General's declaration that the statute impliedly criminalizes physician-assisted suicide.”

The Hippocratic Oath, written about 400 BC, clearly says, “I will give no deadly medicine to any one if asked, nor suggest any such counsel.” Yet, Hippocrates lived in a time before medicine had the ability to keep people alive when they couldn’t breathe on their own, when they couldn’t feed themselves, when painful deaths by cancer, plague and infection were untreatable. Right before that line, the Oath also says, “I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous.” Prolonging a life simply because one can is certainly deleterious and mischievous. And “the benefit of a patient” doesn’t always mean another day of anguish. Government coercion here is merely cruel.


© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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