As I reported here at SHS, Compassion and Choices (formerly the Hemlock Society)—the leaders of which are all so supportive of respecting the political process about assisted suicide in Oregon—at the same time are attempting to trash the right of Montana to outlaw assisted suicide via its political processes by seeking a court decree that the law in the Big Sky State is unconstitutional—a tack that has failed previously in Florida and Alaska.
I haven’t seen all the briefs, but I do have one from the State of Montana, and it makes a cogent point about the debate beyond the court case. The brief notes that promoters of assisted suicide are long on emotion and ideology in their pursuit of state-sanction facilitated suicide, but short on facts. From its Reply Brief (no link, but can supply):
Plaintiffs continue to deal in undefined abstractions like “how one will cross the threshold to death” instead of explaining in detail why physicians must intend to cause a patient’s death in order to relieve suffering or promote dignity at the end of life. (Pls.’ Reply at 3.) Plaintiffs’ basic failure to move past these platitudes and into attractable definition of “aid in dying” confirms the true breadth of their claim: a dying process altogether “free from government control,” ending in a patient dead and a physician immune from prosecution. (Pls.’ Reply at L) There is no precedent for such a right.Indeed. Rarely has the entire agenda been so accurately and succinctly stated.
And with that wide-as-the-ocean-objective, how can any such “right” be limited to those who are diagnosed with a terminal illness (who may, in the end, not die of their disease if allowed to run its course). It won’t be. For once the right to have medical killings facilitated is defined merely as a medical treatment, the next cases will be filed claiming that the restrictions on lethal treatment to alleviate suffering cannot be limited to the dying any more than any other form of palliation. If assisted suicide ever becomes widely accepted in this country, bet on it.
