More on Supreme Court Nominee Neil Gorsuch on End-of-Life Issues
Paula Span, the thoughtful columnist on aging issues from the New York Times, offers “Gorsuch Staunchly Opposes “Aid-in-Dying.” Does It Matter?” The article suggests that the “real” battle over aid-in-dying will be in state courts, not the Supreme Court.
I’m in the middle of reading Judge Gorsuch’s 2006 book, The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. There are many things to say about this book, not the least of which is the impressive display of the Judge’s careful sorting of facts, legal history and legal theory to analyze the various advocacy approaches to end-of-life decisions, with or without the assistance of third-parties.
With respect to what might reach the Supreme Court Court, he writes (at page 220 of the paperback edition):
The [Supreme Court’s] preference for state legislative experimentation in Gonzales [v. Oregon] seems, at the end of the day, to leave the state of the assisted suicide debate more or less where the Court found it, with the states free to resolve the question for themselves. Even so, it raises interesting questions for at least two future sorts of cases one might expect to emerge in the not-too-distant future. The first sort of cases are “as applied” challenges asserting a constitutional right to assist suicide or euthanasia limited to some particular group, such as the terminally ill or perhaps those suffering grave physical (or maybe even psychological) pain….
The second sort of cases involve those like Lee v. Oregon…, asserting that laws allowing assisted suicide violate the equal protection guarantee….”
While most of the book is a meticulous analysis of law and policy, in the end he also seems to signal a personal concern, writing “Is it possible that the Journal of Clinical Oncology study is right and the impulse for assistance in suicide, like the impulse for old-fashioned suicide, might more often than not be the result of an often readily treatable condition?”
My thanks to New York attorney, now Florida resident, Karen Miller for pointing us to the NYT article.