Culture Of Life 101 . . . “The Third Time Around: The History Of Euthanasia In The United States” (Conclusion)

By BRIAN CLOWES

(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of chapter 23 of The Facts of Life, “Euthanasia,” e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)

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The pro-euthanasia movement in the United States is led by judges who have enacted a succession of legal principles in order to expand the pool of people eligible to be killed. This process began with the doctrine of substituted judgment, the expansion of the right to privacy into a “super-right,” the classification of food and water as “extraordinary,” and the suppression of the conscience rights of medical professionals who oppose euthanasia.
All that remained was to build on this foundation by legalizing physician-assisted suicide, first in individual cases and then in one state after another. The ultimate goal, of course, is to maneuver the Supreme Court of the United States into legalizing physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia nationwide, just as it did with contraception, abortion, and ersatz homosexual “marriage.”
Legalizing Individual Cases of Physician-Assisted Suicide. A decade before the first state legalized physician-assisted suicide, the California court system paved the way in the Elizabeth Bouvia case. She was a bedridden 28-year-old quadriplegic with cerebral palsy who was in constant unrelieved pain and who had clearly expressed a desire to die. Hospital staff had earlier begun to feed her intravenously against her wishes. She asked a court to order that the tube be removed. The court refused and Bouvia appealed.
The resultant frightening decision by the California Court of Appeals took a long step toward legalizing and abetting suicide. This was the first court decision that upheld a “right” to refuse basic care.
The majority opinion argued that the medical profession and the state should be “permitting and in fact assisting the patient to die with ease and dignity.”
The court ruled that a patient need not be in a coma or near death in order to decline treatment. The patient may decide whether or not his or her “quality of life” is sufficient to go on living. The court decided that motives play a nonessential part in such a decision, and ruled that Bouvia’s feeding tube could be removed.
Inventing a General Right to Physician-Assisted Suicide. On November 5, 1991, Washington state voters rejected by a 54-46 margin the first referendum in U.S. history that would have legalized physician-assisted suicide.
However, like other Culture of Death activists, euthanasiasts rely heavily on public opinion polls when they favor their positions, and always ignore them and rely upon the court system instead when the polls are against them.
Litigation began in 1994 when the pro-euthanasia group Compassion for Dying (CFD), four doctors, and three terminally ill people filed suit in federal court challenging the 140-year-old Washington state law against promoting or assisting in another person’s suicide. U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Rothstein ruled in May 1994 that the plaintiffs had a constitutional right to help in committing suicide, thus becoming the first federal judge ever to find this right in the Constitution.
The state appealed her ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which in March 1995 voted 2-1 to overturn Rothstein’s ruling. The full court of 11 judges then reconsidered the case at CFD’s request.
Compassion for Dying v. State of Washington was the first euthanasia case any federal court of appeals had ever decided, and the Ninth Circuit exploited this opportunity to strip-mine the Constitution to unearth a new fundamental “human right.”
On March 6, 1996, the Ninth Circuit decided 8-3 that the Washington state law banning “assisted suicide” violated the Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The court used Rothstein’s language as it drew a direct parallel between abortion and euthanasia, holding that “like the decision of whether or not to have an abortion, the decision how and when to die is one of ‘the most intimate and personal choices a person may make in a lifetime,’ a choice that is ‘central to personal dignity and autonomy’.”
In its decision, the Ninth Circuit extensively quoted the Supreme Court’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, which established abortion as a fundamental right that is completely independent of the right to privacy.
Roe v. Wade, quoted a dozen times in the decision, said that states may limit abortion if they have a “compelling interest” in preventing it. By stark contrast, in Compassion for Dying, the court stated that a state interest in preventing suicide can never exist:
“No matter how much weight could legitimately be afforded the state’s interest in preventing suicide, that weight, when combined with the weight given all of the other state interests, was insufficient to outweigh the terminally ill individual’s interest in deciding whether to end his or her agony and suffering by hastening the time of his or her death with medication prescribed by his or her physician.”
Many legal scholars agreed that cutting the states out of the picture entirely was an even more breathtaking exercise of “raw judicial power” than Roe v. Wade itself.
The death toll due to euthanasia legalization in Oregon and Washington was 1,620 as of the end of 2015 — but this is just the beginning. Vermont and California have recently legalized physician-assisted suicide, and Compassion & Choices and other pro-euthanasia organizations have as their final goal the legalization of euthanasia throughout the United States through the Supreme Court. As we have seen, such nationwide legalization would cause the number of euthanasias to exceed a quarter million per year.
Summary of the Progression. As these court cases show, the illegitimate “right to privacy,” found nowhere in the U.S. Constitution, led first to the total legalization of contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut), the total legalization of abortion (Roe v. Wade), the legalization of infanticide (Baby Doe), the legalization of involuntary passive euthanasia (Cruzan and Brophy), and the legalization of voluntary active euthanasia (Compassion for Dying).
The progression down the slippery slope could not possibly be clearer.
All Western nations now have the highest proportions of elderly people in their histories. They also all have the lowest birthrates in their histories, which means fewer and fewer workers will be supporting more and more of the retired elderly.
Thus, pressure is already mounting to “cut costs” and “conserve scarce health-care resources” by withdrawing care from the handicapped, the severely ill, and the elderly. Health rationing has already made inroads into North America and Europe; under some of these plans, people above a certain age are disqualified from receiving certain medical treatment.
Many medical professionals support such rationing. A director of a critical care unit once said: “We must face the un-American fact that not all individuals’ remaining lives have equal value. Value should be assessed…on how their survival enriches or drains their family and community.”
The Disability Rag (now the Ragged Edge) has kept a careful watch on this deadly trend:
“Most students of the economy, and of the medical economy in particular, agree that the need to contain medical costs is absolute and urgent. The questions that divide us involve how it should be done.
The first step is to admit to the cruel necessity of rationing health care. The second is to set limits on health care according to principles of equity and justice. How do we decide who gets to receive a scarce health resource?. . . One obvious consideration is age. . . . The worsening death rates for older patients are hard to explain, but may be the result of underuse of such lifesaving therapies as clot-busting drugs. . . . Charles Hennekens, MD, agreed with the study author’s conclusions that lifesaving therapies are too often withheld from older patients simply because of their age.”
Some disability rights advocates have complained that it is not the people themselves who decide their own fate, it is the medical profession and its many bean-counters. But there is an equitable division of labor, say groups like Not Dead Yet: “They do all the deciding; we do all the dying.”
There is only one step remaining for the euthanasiasts: The legalization of involuntary active euthanasia.
This is the final stated goal of the euthanasia movement, which will never stop agitating until it finally achieves all of its objectives.