Guest Commentary: San Francisco Chronicle on Assisted Suicide

By None, The Ridgecrest Daily Independent, Jan. 23, 2006

Making decisions over life and death is never easy, or comfortable.

But in 1994, the people of Oregon voted for the Death with Dignity Act - the only one of its kind in the nation - empowering terminally ill patients to make that decision for themselves.

Both the Bush administration and then-Attorney General John Ashcroft challenged the state's law and invoked an unrelated federal drug law to punish doctors who help terminally ill patients die.

But on Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court rightly decided, with a 6-3 ruling, to uphold Oregon's assisted-suicide law.

"The court's decision today is perhaps driven by a feeling that the subject of assisted suicide is none of the federal government's business," wrote a dissenting Justice Antonin Scalia. "It is easy to sympathize with that position."

The idea of allowing doctors - or anyone - to help end one's life has, understandably, outraged many Americans. But it is a decision that must be made by an individual, not by the government.

Oregon's law includes rigorous safeguards, ensuring a thoughtful and reflective process between patients and their doctor before making the deeply personal decision.

Still, critics argue that the law will encourage an easy way out for patients. There's nothing easy about death, as evidenced by the small number of people who have used the law to end their lives. In Oregon, where the law has been in effect since 1998, about a third of the 325 people who requested lethal drugs never used them.

In this complicated case, where politics and religion have created a passionate debate, the government should remember who's really involved -- real people with terminal illnesses who, through this law, can find some sense of peace and comfort in knowing that they have a choice.

The Supreme Court recognized that the government has no place at the bedside of terminally ill Americans who have made firm decisions on the level of care they will or will not receive in their final days.

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