Another Major Victory in 'Right To Die' Case

HELENA, Montana — A Montana judge has ruled that doctor-assisted suicides are legal in the state, a decision likely to be appealed as the state argues that the Legislature, not the court, should decide whether terminally ill patients have the right to take their own life.

Judge Dorothy McCarter issued the ruling late Friday in the case of a Billings man with terminal cancer, who had sued the state with four physicians that treat terminally ill patients and a nonprofit patients' rights group.

"The Montana constitutional rights of individual privacy and human dignity, taken together, encompass the right of a competent terminally (ill) patient to die with dignity," McCarter said in the ruling.

It also said that those patients had the right to obtain self-administered medications to hasten death if they find their suffering to be unbearable, and that physicians can prescribe such medication without fear of prosecution.

"The patient's right to die with dignity includes protection of the patient's physician from liability under the state's homicide statutes," the judge wrote.

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I'm certainly no proponent of rogue judges making law from the bench, but if this judge is interpreting existing law correctly then this is a major victory for terminally ill patients.

As a staunch pro-life supporter, I am often taken to task on my support of end of life decision making and capital punishment. Capital punishment is a discussion for a different time. In so much as the decision to die was made by the person who will die, my pro-life stance ends there. There is no innocent person being killed, like an unborn baby. I am a Christian, having spent most of my Christian life in a Southern Baptist setting. Southern Baptists and many other denominations do not share their support of a right to die mentality. Their case is made in explaining how God will call us home when it's our time and until then our life could be ministering to someone (that's the really dumbed down version of it).

I am in and out of hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and private residences regularly. I see firsthand the degradation of the quality of life, the unbearable pain, the humiliation of not being able to care for oneself, the misery of knowing the toll one is taking on ones family, and being trapped in a body that doesn't work and never will again. As a human-being, I never want to be alive under those conditions. I would beg my family, my doctors, my nurses and anyone else who would listen to end my suffering. Am I playing the role of God? Maybe!

I'm not advocating that anyone and everyone should be allowed to run out to clinics of suicide. I am advocating right to die laws for the terminally ill, the person who will be in a vegetative state (if they've declared their intent previously in a living will or other legal document), and/or people who have tragically had their lives forever altered into a state that requires others to care for them. To deny a person the right to die under these circumstances is to enact cruel and unusual punishment, even torture, and in a civilized society such as the United Socialist States of America we're above these types of punishments.

Kudos to Montana. I hope the rest of the country will follow suit.