Posted on 01/17/2006 7:07:26 AM PST by SoFloFreeper
BREAKING ON THE AP WIRE:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court has upheld Oregon's one-of-a-kind physician-assisted suicide law, rejecting a Bush administration attempt to punish doctors who help terminally ill patients die.
You'll have plenty of euthanasia in Oregon in consequence of this assisted suicide law. Only the grossly uninformed and the foolish would fail to understand that.
A statement not supported by fact. Many of those who are given the lethal prescriptions have chosen not to use them. They have them in case they decide to, but ultimately did not. Or are you saying that writing a prescription is tantamount to preventing their suicides?
No, because Kervorkian violated and was charged under a state law.
This SCOTUS ruling upheld state's rights in this matter and said that the Feds don't have a constitutional dog in this fight.
And please show me the evidence of that.
They didn't decide that the people have any rights. They decided that the states have rights. Rights are to be divided up between state and federal governments. If there are any rights left over that nobody else wants, those go to the people.
Doctors and patients are killing patients now just to get them out of the way. This law legitimizes it and gives them a way to pitch it in a way that guarantees they will never be held accountable.
Oregon is the nation's first official death hell hole. I pity the people who live (and will be murdered by health care staff) there.
That's all well and good, but don't mistake your ideology for the law. There's a huge difference.
Certainly they didn't base it on any foundational principle of America.
Yeah, but so what? There wasn't any "foundational principle" at issue. The only question before the Court was whether the Attorney General construed the statute and regulations properly.
This is a supremely RADICAL decision which flies in the face of everything this country once stood for.
Actually, Congress could pass a law overturning this tomorrow. That makes the decision anything but radical.
Perhaps they are basing it in penumbras and emanations?
Perhaps you should just read the opinion. That might help.
Let's not get spun up and start losing track of what really happened here...
The Court did not uphold Oregon's assisted suicide law so much as it shot down the ham-fisted attempt to overturn it by the Justice Department. There is an enormous difference between the two.
It is still entirely possible for Congress to pass a federal statute, that is Constitutional, that outlaws assisted suicide. That would be an effective way to ban Doctor-asisted suicide, if that is the will of the Congress. Absent a Federal law that might have over-ruled Oregon law, the way that John Ashcroft chose to pursue overturning Oregon's Law was not the best way to attack the problem, and was doomed from the start. I do not question his motivation, just the method that was chosen.
This is a State's Rights issue, and that is how the Court appears to have ruled. It's early , and I have not read the ruling, but I've seen enough reports from different sources to be satisfied with that explanation.
Keep trying though. We all think it's in everyone's best interests that you run moral condundrums through your mind frequently.
The ruling didn't touch on state's rights. Instead, in touched on John Ashcraft.
LOL - I wonder how many people will be too lazy to read it for themselves, and just take your word for it.
From http://www.ohsu.edu/ethics/guidebook/chapter15.pdf
"If the attending physician decides not to participate, he/she promptly needs to provide the patient with a referral or a source of information about participating providers. Physician-assisted suicide is a legal medical practice, and the attending physician who declines to participate may not abandon the patient. A timely referral to a participating provider or to a resource for information concerning participating providers should minimize claims of abandonment."
It happens that I never damned G-d for all the sh&t and misery at the time because at the time I didn't care if he existed or not. And at the time, when I recovered -- and I was determined to recover, I didn't thank Him. Again because I didn't care if He Was or Was Not.
Live and learn. Now I say "Thanks, G-d!"
Yet I could not, being a fiendishly honest person, now say "Thanks!", if my thank you included just the recovery, for a return to status quo ante (that is, the situation prior to my becoming sick) say when a thief steals your property and then later returns it deserves not thanks to the thief.
My thanks is for all of it. All the aggravation, sickness and misery, all the recovery, all as if together at once, so to speak.
No theif was Providence to so wreck and pain me, for in all that was some light of the spirit to be found, that has been over thirty years in the finding. Never should a person ask for such misery, or as your case, to see a loved dear person in such misery. Misery is misery! Yet, as long as some life exists it is never total, and has within some precious spark to be found by the hunter.
One's life is not one's own, you are only a bailee with a bailment. You life's primal duty is as custodian to that life vouchsafed to you, to hold more dear -- as is the rule in bailments -- then your own property.
Your living will invalidated? It should, G-d help us all, never have been considered valid in the first place with regard to that circumstance.
I have mixed feeling about assisted suicide.
I just don't want the federal gov't involved with
what everybody does or does not like.
I haven't gone back to read my previous comments, but I don't believe I used the word euthanasia. I know very well that it's a law which makes it possible for physicians to provide a patient with the means to painlessly commit suicide.
I am not commenting from a legal or technical perspective, although I think suicide may still be a crime in some states and I am almost positive that assisting in a suicide still is. I am commenting from a moral perspective. It is, or was, a crime because suicide violates a moral precept that historically has been accepted in Christian/western nations for many years. Laws against suicide were based on a belief that human life is created by a higher power, God in the Christian's view, and only God has the rightful authority to end the life he created. God can and does delegate that authority to government on certain conditions, and to individuals on certain, very limited conditions. But suicide doesn't meet any of those conditions. Suicide still amounts to self-inflicted premeditated murder as a matter of morality whether or not it's legal as a matter of law.
The OR law turns that age-old moral precept on it's head not only by removing the criminal aspect of the act, but also by enabling a person to commit suicide more easily and efficiently with the aid of medical advice and by access to the means of committing the act. If the OR law involved a felony crime instead of the de-criminalized but immoral act of suicide, a person who knowingly and willingly provided the weapon used to commit the crime would be guilty of aiding and abetting a criminal act. Viewed from a moral perspective, it still is.
OK, to be technically correct, exchange "administering" to "providing" the fatal dose. Same result no matter which party administers the drug, and morally abhorrent in either case.
Indeed. But if, say, Vermont refused to make murder illegal, do you not think that the federal government would step in and prosecute murder? Of course, and rightly so. This is one of those few areas that the government is supposed to stick its nose in.
Great decision, but hugely disappointing behavior by Scalia and Thomas. Our only two even semi-libertarian justices are often ready to heave principle out the window for an outcome they prefer. Unless of course, like Thomas on medical marijuana they can have their cake and eat it too: a dissent but knowing the outcome is going their way. Too bad. No better than the liberals.
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