Et cetcras Good questions
GOOD QUESTIONS - The lead-up to the January 7 Supreme Court hearing on physician-assisted suicide showed a less-than-skeptical media preparing the country for the inevitable: Physician-assisted...
...What empirical basis do I have for evaluating that argument...
...And ultimately it's going to gravitate out of physician-assisted suicide into euthanasia...
...Justice Anthony M. Kennedy: "Surely legislators have much more flexibility and a much greater capacity to absorb these kinds of arguments and make these decisions than we do...
...GOOD QUESTIONS - The lead-up to the January 7 Supreme Court hearing on physician-assisted suicide showed a less-than-skeptical media preparing the country for the inevitable: Physician-assisted suicide...
...is going to...
...gravitate down to those who are not terminally ill...
...So reasonable...
...We can say there's a liberty interest in murdering people, however it's outweighed by the state's interest in preserving the lives of its citizens...
...It was refreshing then to have the Justices raising the critical questions the media forgot to ask...
...Justice Antonin Scalia: "I suppose that proclaiming a liberty interest is cost-free so long as you can proclaim them and then say, however they can be outweighed by various social policies adopted by the states...
...You're asking us in effect to declare unconstitutional the laws of fifty states...
...Justice David H. Souter: "The argument runs [that...
...I'm not sure how I should weigh or value that risk...
...So in keeping with medical progress...
...Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist: "The liberty interest [Cruzan] recognized was the right to refuse medical treatment....Declining medical treatment is something quite different from suicide....Why can't a society simply determine as a matter of public morality that it is wrong to kill yourself just as it is wrong to kill someone else...
...the practice of assistance...
...I guess we could do that, couldn't we...
...So rational...
...Listening to oral arguments, pro and con, for a case they will decide by the end of this term, the Justices asked (from excerpts in the Washington Post, January 9,1997): Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: "In the Cruzan case, the court recognized a liberty interest and yet it upheld restrictive legislation....So couldn't one take the same approach here, there is a liberty interest, but because of the risks and dangers involved, considerable state regulation is permissible...
Vol. 124 • January 1997 • No. 2
