Assisted suicide law stays alive!:
The Roberts court has upheld Oregon's assisted suicide law. More on this later. It's frustrating when interesting news breaks out on the first day of classes!
The Roberts court has upheld Oregon's assisted suicide law. More on this later. It's frustrating when interesting news breaks out on the first day of classes!
posted by Melanie @ 11:20 AM
8 Comments:
The Roberts Court, but not Roberts it seems. Although he didn't write a separate dissent, so its hard to tell exactly what he was thinking. I'm not sure I buy Scalia's beef:
"If the term `legitimate medical purpose' has any meaning, it surely excludes the prescription of drugs to produce death"
It certainly does have a meaning and i can certainly see assisted suicide, under the conditions setby the Oregon law as legitimate. The person being assisted must be sound of mind, have a terminal, incurable disease, and be confirmed by 2 doctors as having less than 6 months to live. We have a word for releasing someone suffering from which they cannot escape. Mercy. If anything, keeping people alive long past the time that nature should have claimed them, just so they can eek out another few months of pain/bed-ridden existence is the illegitimate "medical purpose".
Oh, I'm a huge fan of Oregon's law, and I'm in favor of euthenasia. Why we show mercy to pets but not to humans is beyond me.
Well put. I was going to mention the pets argument, but was worried that someone might try and take it as an actual equation of animals with humans in legal terms. But it is a good point because if we can take the life of a pet without consent , presumably because we recognize the animal's suffering as a bad thing, then how can a fully cognizant and consenting human being be different? If anything, the human, for the the stated reasons is more worthy of having her request granted, both for the aforementioned reasons of consent and because, presumably, pointless human suffering is a worse thing in our eyes than even pointless animal suffering.
That was my favorite thing about the4 Schiavo case - all the right wing moralists howling about how it wouldn't be legal to let a dog die the way she did. Yeah, because it wasn't legal to show Terri the same mercy you show a dog in those circumstances.
The Schiavo case wasn't about preserving a human life or extending mercy. It was about power. It was about in-laws who never liked their daughter's husband. In the end, it was a fight over who had the final word. Unfortunately, I'm not sure either party had Ms. Schiavo's best interests at heart, and the whole affair disgusted me. May her soul finally rest in peace.
This just in -- Congress is all up in election-year-arms and is contemplating overturning Oregon's freshly upheld assisted suicide law. If I knew more HTML, I'd put a fancy link in here. But I don't. And nothing is uglier than a seemingly incoherent URL. Find the article on Yahoo or your news service of choice. You all are net-savvy surfers.
Let me give you this coherent URL, then!
My own personal opinion, same as the Schiavo case, is that Congress has no inherent authority to do this.
I mean, are the loonies in the House so crazy that they don't realize what this means? If they overrule state laws they don't like, they create a precedent for a Democratic Congress to overrule laws that they do like. Death Penalty, anyone?
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