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The Supreme Court on Abortion
On January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court in two separate decisions (Roe vs. Wade and Doe vs. Bolton) ruled that any state abortion law in the future would have to meet the following guidelines:
1. First Trimester: During the first three months of pregnancy, the state must leave the abortion decision entirely to a woman and her physician.
2. Second Trimester: During the second three months, the state may only enact laws, which regulate abortions in ways "reasonably related to maternal health." This simply means that a state may determine who is qualified to perform the abortion and where such an operation may take place. The state may not, however, enact laws, which safeguard the lives of the unborn.
3. Third Trimester: After the woman's sixth or seventh month of pregnancy, the law may forbid her to have an abortion that is not determined to be necessary to preserve her "life or health." The court went on to define the word "health" in such broad terms i.e., social well-being- as to make it virtually impossible for a state to protect the unborn child even after the sixth or seventh month of pregnancy. (Doe vs. Bolton, 410 U.S. 179 stated...the medical judgment maybe exercised in the light of all factors - physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age - relevant to the well-being of the patient. All these factors may relate to health. This allows the attending physician the room he needs...410 U.S. at 192.)
Thus, the justices of the Supreme Court disregarding prior legal tradition, overwhelming biological evidence and the ethical traditions of a majority of American people, struck down the abortion laws of all 50 states (even the most permissive at the time) and made abortion on demand, at virtually every stage of pregnancy, the law of the land. On January 22, 1973, the court gave the United States the dubious distinction of having the most permissive abortion law of any nation in the Western world. Roe vs. Wade, Doe vs. Bolton were decided by a 7-2 vote. Justice Blackmun wrote the majority opinion with Justices White and Rehnquist dissenting.
The Supreme Court on Euthanasia
The U.S. Supreme Court provided a dramatic break in the slide down the slippery slope toward active euthanasia with its unanimous decisions in the 1997 Glucksberg and Quill cases. The court refused to discover a right to assisted suicide in the constitution. Had the court decided otherwise, laws banning assisted suicide in nearly every state would have been overturned, vis-à-vis Roe v Wade. Over the years, the attempt by pro-euthanasia advocates to define euthanasia rights through the courts has followed a very specific strategy. As the following progression of cases demonstrates, the plan begins by taking the legitimate concept of allowing competent patients to die naturally, and twisting it to allow others to choose to kill vulnerable patients.
The Deadly Progression: Asserting the Right to Euthanasia
The previous line of "right to die" cases dealt directly with decision-making for incompetent patients, both conscious and unconscious. The following cases deal with individuals asserting the right to intentionally bring about their death, when a natural course of events would not otherwise do so. These cases represent the third step in a four-step strategy to legitimize euthanasia of competent patients have the right to request death on demand.
Crossing the Line to Active Euthanasia
All of the case summaries up to this point have dealt with the judicial system's endorsement of passive euthanasia. These rulings have firmly entrenched within our system the right to refuse medical treatment and die from natural causes, the right to have treatment withheld via an advance directive and the power to request treatment withdrawal for another via substituted judgment. All three of these "rights" exemplify how far we have already come down the path to acceptance of euthanasia in all forms. Currently we are facing the possibility of taking the final leap from approval of passive euthanasia to legal sanctioning of active euthanasia. Challenges in federal courts to laws which ban (Washington state) and legalize (Oregon) assisted suicide could be crucial in determining if we are destined to follow in the Netherlands' footsteps where assisted suicide is tolerated.
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