Three New Yorkers — two terminally ill and one fearful that his cancer will soon be terminal — have filed suit to legalize doctor-assisted suicide. While we extend the utmost sympathy, the court’s answer must be no.
The profound question of whether New York will abandon a longstanding criminal prohibition barring assisted suicide must be decided in the Legislature, not by a small coterie of judges.
Then, too, the lawsuit’s arguments range from weak to barely worth consideration.
The least impressive contends that patients who take lethal medication do not legally commit suicide, nor do doctors violate New York’s assisted suicide statute by helping them. Instead, this is “aid-in-dying” and thus legal, the plaintiffs say.
Considering the momentous life-and-death issues at stake, a judge would be irresponsible to throw out the finely studied rules governing doctor-patient obligations based on semantics.
Bolstering the point, judicial reading must include the findings of a state commission that, in 1994, studied who, among patients, families and doctors, should be empowered to call the shots for health care.
The panel was unanimous that “New York laws prohibiting assisted suicide and euthanasia should not be changed.”
The plaintiffs allege that the ban on assisted suicide violates their due process rights under the state constitution.
Basically, they argue that the law against assisted suicide is unconstitutionally selective: Terminally ill patients can opt to stop treatment or refuse food and water, thus hastening death, but they are banned from ingesting narcotics to die quickly.
But those two cases are infinitely different. No one could ever write a law against allowing nature to take its course, but laws against speeding nature on its way are rational expressions of the high public interest in protecting life.
Although the 1994 commission included members who supported the concept of assisted suicide, the panelists came down against it because they envisioned potential social perils.
Citing “the widespread failure of American medicine to treat pain adequately or to diagnose and treat depression in many cases,” the commission said the risk of coerced death “would be most severe for those whose autonomy and well-being are already compromised by poverty, lack of access to good medical care, or membership in a stigmatized social group.”
Judges are in no position either to divine a new standard for the practice of medicine, in the process throwing out the centuries of moral and legal study that underpin the law, or to grapple with consequences of sanctioning assisted suicide.
The Legislature has refused to approve assisted suicide, so the plaintiffs are hoping that a judge will do it. The courts should defer to lawmakers.
![In a narrow vote this week, the Federal Trade Commission approved a rule that will ban the vast majority of noncompete clauses by U.S. employers, which have long prevented workers from switching jobs or setting out on their own. In doing so, the agency did its duty to protect American economic dynamism and opportunity, nothing less, nothing more. We hope that’s the clear conclusion of the courts that will now rule on a lawsuit being brought by the Chamber of Commerce, which has strenuously supported this anticompetitive practice. Of the arguments that the business group and other opponents have rolled […]](https://www.nydailynews.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/GettyImages-1820955015.jpg?w=490 "In a narrow vote this week, the Federal Trade Commission approved a rule that will ban the vast majority of noncompete clauses by U.S. employers, which have long prevented workers from switching jobs or setting out on their own. In doing so, the agency did its duty to protect American economic dynamism and opportunity, nothing less, nothing more. We hope that’s the clear conclusion of the courts that will now rule on a lawsuit being brought by the Chamber of Commerce, which has strenuously supported this anticompetitive practice. Of the arguments that the business group and other opponents have rolled […]")
