Court’s Role Is Not To Play God

Openly scorning the right of the public and the states to settle one of the toughest moral questions of our time, a federal court has invented from thin air a chilling new constitutional right - to physician-assisted suicide.

This decision is judicial activism and federal arrogance at their worst. It seized the lawmaking role away from voters and the legislative branch of government and appropriated it for eight judicial ideologues at the notoriously liberal 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

The implications are profound - for the ill and elderly, for the medical profession, for the brutal climate of our cost-cutting health care system, for our already clogged courts, for the crumbling foundations of western ethics, and for presidential politics.

In 1991 after thorough debate, Washington’s voters defeated an initiative that would have permitted physician-assisted suicide for the terminally ill. Suicide advocates then turned to the courts, challenging the constitutionality of a Washington state law - duplicated in laws and medical ethics throughout the Western world - that prohibits physicians from assisting a suicide.

Never mind, the San Francisco judges say, we know better. Their ruling imagines a previously unnoticed right to assisted suicide in the wording of the 14th Amendment, which merely says, “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law.”

The eight judges claim to see no distinction between administering a fatal dose of drugs and shutting off life-support machinery as current law allows physicians to do if requested by a patient’s living will. These judges are blind. When physicians shut off a machine they allow nature to take its course. When physicians actively kill a patient they interfere with nature, and step into a moral abyss.

The next level down in that abyss is a place where relatives could pressure a frail grandmother to die so medical bills don’t drain the inheritance. It is a place where insurance companies could add a lethal twist to the cost-cutting pressure they already apply to medical care providers. It is a place where representatives of the dying could sue to demand that unwilling doctors and hospitals kill fading patients as this nightmarish “right” would require.

The ruling must be appealed. And, it gives voters food for thought as they consider presidential candidates, who vie for the often-overlooked power to appoint federal judges.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board