Fundamental Rights and Physician-Assisted Suicide: Protecting Personal Autonomy

Summary

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I. Fundamental Liberty Interests A. Recent Supreme Court Precedents B. Growing Beyond Ancient Roots - Compassion In Dying II. Conclusion

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Extract

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Fundamental Rights and Physician-Assisted Suicide: Protecting Personal Autonomy

This Recent Development was written and prepared for publication before the Supreme Court issued its decision in Washington v. Glucksberg, 117 S. Ct. 2258 (1997), and Quill v. Vacco, 117 S. Ct. 2293 (1997). In Glucksberg the Supreme Court held that the asserted right to assisted suicide is not a fundamental liberty interest protected by due process. In Quill the Court determined that the New York laws prohibiting assisted suicide did not violate equal protection.

J.D. candidate, The University of Iowa College of Law, 1998.

Sometimes fear stalks me like another malignancy, sapping energy and power and attention from my work. A cold becomes sinister; a cough, lung cancer; a bruise, leukemia. Those fears are most powerful when they are not given voice, and close upon their heels comes the fury that I cannot shake them. I am learning to live beyond fear by living through it. . . . When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less important whether or not I am unafraid.1

I was fourteen when Cathy discovered a lump in her right breast. But it was more than a year later before a doctor properly diagnosed my sister's breast cancer and predicted she would die within the year. A year that included her thirtieth birthday.

So they gave her one year and she lived six. Six years of mastectomy, radiation, chemotherapy and bone marrow ...

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