Do the Terminally Ill Have a Right to Die?

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First, human life may be a finite experience, although viewing it as a terminal disease is a morbid way to look at it, but that still doesn’t mean a person, particularly one dying of a terminal illness, should have to suffer unnecessarily – either mentally or physically – just to wait for death by natural causes. Death may be inevitable. Prolonged suffering doesn’t have to be.    

Second, you may not have a Constitutional right to physician aided dying, but neither is it constitutionally prohibited. Although the Supreme Court did not find (under the Due Process Clause) a constitutionally protected right to die, neither did they declare a Constitutional prohibition on physician aided dying…leaving the decision to the individual states to legislate. The Court also has found that there is a constitutionally protected right to refuse medical treatment, even though it may hasten death. 

Why is refusal of treatment protected, but not the choice to get treatment to hasten one’s own death? It’s the assumption that that only God or natural causes should have the ability to end human life. Yet few really live to that standard absolutely. And certainly, we have not maintained that as an absolute in our society. Thus we have legalized (all with the Constitutional affirmation of the Supreme Court) the taking of life in self defense, soldiers killing in war, and abortion, to name several examples.

Finally, the absence of a constitutionally protected “right to die” does not mean it’s not a right. It just means the US Constitution doesn’t protect it. Many so called fundamental human rights are not protected by the US Constitution…economic, social and cultural rights such as the right to food or housing for example. Furthermore, although the Supreme Court has not yet found so, one could argue that the right to control one’s death is an implied right, unenumerated but still protected under the 9th Amendment under the framework of liberty or even privacy, as was done with the right to marital privacy (the court ruled a prohibition on using contraceptives unconstitutional) in Griswold v Connecticut or the right to abortion, in Roe v Wade. The fact that the current Court hasn't found this doesn't mean a more progressive future Court won't.