ABA Family Legal Guide

Health-Care Law

Specific Issues in Health Care

Assisted Suicide

Is there a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide?

In 1997, three terminally ill patients, four doctors, and a nonprofit group that counsels patients considering physician-assisted suicide filed suit in federal court, claiming that Washington State's ban on physician-assisted suicide is unconstitutional. They asserted that the "right" to receive assistance in committing suicide is a liberty protected by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. They prevailed at the district court and appellate court levels, but ultimately lost in the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Court stated that Washington's ban on physician-assisted suicide did not infringe on a fundamental liberty under the Due Process Clause. Rather, an examination of American history, legal practices, and legal traditions shows that there are no exceptions to the assisted-suicide ban for those near death. To find such a right in the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court would have had to overturn centuries of legal practice and doctrine and go against the public policy of nearly every state in the country. Rather, the Court held, the ban was rationally related to legitimate government interests, such as prohibiting intentional killing and preserving human life, protecting the medical profession's integrity and ethics and maintaining physicians' role as their patients' healers, and preventing harm to those people who are the most vulnerable, including the poor, the elderly, disabled people, and the terminally ill.

In a companion case decided the same day, the Court also held that New York State's ban on assisted suicide did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Physicians and gravely ill patients filed suit, claiming that New York violated the equal protection of the laws by permitting patients to hasten their deaths by refusing life support systems, but not permitting them to hasten their deaths by self-administered prescribed drugs. An appellate court agreed with them, but the Supreme Court held that the distinction between letting a patient die and making a patient die is important, logical, rational, and well established: "[T]he two acts are different, and New York may, therefore, consistent with the Constitution, treat them differently."

The Court's rulings leave states free to decide to enact laws allowing physicians to assist patients who wish to end their lives. The Court's rulings simply mean that the states are not required by the Constitution to do so.