Letter from law professor, Stephen Mikochik urging Delaware Governor Meyer to veto assisted suicide bill HB 140, “The Ron Silverio/Heather Block End of Life Options Law.”
Dear Gov. Meyer:Stephen Mikochik
I am a professor emeritus of Constitutional Law at Temple Law School in Philadelphia and a senior lecturer in Jurisprudence at Ave Maria Law School in Naples, Florida. I have reviewed numerous state proposals to legalize physician-assisted suicide. House Bill 140 would authorize that practice in Delaware.
I
urge you not to sign H.B. 140. The bill threatens vulnerable patients, is not
needed to mitigate pain at the end of life and creates a right that all
competent persons who wish to end their lives for whatever reason will demand.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that physician-assisted suicide is not a fundamental right guaranteed by the Federal Constitution;[1] and nowhere has the Supreme Court of Delaware held it protected under the State Constitution. Therefore, the question of whether to legalize assisted suicide is one of policy in Delaware; and the balance clearly weighs in favor of rejecting it.
On the one hand, a chief reason for rejecting assisted suicide is the protection of vulnerable patients from abuse. As the U.S. Supreme Court explained:
We have recognized … the real risk of subtle coercion and undue influence in end-of-life situations. … The risk of harm is greatest for the many individuals in our society whose autonomy and well-being are already compromised by poverty, lack of access to good medical care, advanced age, or membership in a stigmatized social group. … The State’s interest here goes beyond protecting the vulnerable from coercion; it extends to protecting disabled and terminally ill people from prejudice, negative and inaccurate stereotypes, and societal indifference. The State’s assisted-suicide ban reflects and reinforces its policy that the lives of terminally ill, disabled, and elderly people must be no less valued than the lives of the young and healthy and that a seriously disabled person’s suicidal impulses should be interpreted and treated the same way as anyone else’s.[2]
As shown in the attached letter to Sen. Sokola, H.B. 140 provides only phantom safeguards for vulnerable patients.
It is argued on the other hand that assisted suicide is needed to mitigate physical pain at the end of life. Most terminal patients, however, die peacefully; palliative care can control the pain of those who do not; and sedation is available if that care proves ineffective. Irremediable pain is not a major concern terminal patients express for seeking assisted suicide and is not a qualifying condition in H.B. 140 or nearly all other assisted suicide measures. Thus, it is not a factor that should tip the balance in favor of legalization.
It is further argued that H.B. 140 is needed to mitigate distress at the end of life. As the U.S. Supreme Court observed, however, many patients who request assistance in suicide withdraw that request when their depression is treated.[3] Depression, of course, affects others who have no terminal condition; but that only strengthens their claim for access to assistance in suicide since they may face distress, not for months, but for a life-time.
Finally, it is argued that assisted suicide protects the dignity of terminal patients by respecting their choice. Yet, the threat to dignity is death itself; choosing death by poison over death by cancer is a feeble capitulation to that threat. To recast that choice as the right to act on one’s deepest beliefs on the meaning of life would make “the right to suicide and the right to assistance in suicide … the prerogative of at least every sane adult[:]”[4]
The depressed twenty-one year old, the romantically-devastated twenty-eight year old, the alcoholic forty- year old who choose suicide are also expressing their views … [on] existence, meaning, the universe, and life; they are also asserting their personal liberty.[5]
The State may act gradually to avoid the free-fall that Canada has faced; it may make exceptions for those whose family obligations would fall upon it if they died; but, once suicide is legalized for terminal patients, expansion is inevitable: How could the State distinguish among persons’ beliefs about the meaning of their lives?
You alone can sign H.B. 140 into law. You thus have the awful power to choose between life and death. I urge you not to sign it, and choose life.
Respectfully submitted,
Stephen L. Mikochik
[1] See Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702 (1997).
[2] Id. at 731-732 (citations & internal quotation marks omitted).
[3] Ibid.
[4] Compassion in Dying v. State of Washington, 49 F. 3d 586, 591 (9th Cir. 1995), reversed en banc by 79 F.3d 790 (9th Cir. 1996), reversed by Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 721.
[5] Id. at 590-591.