The Supreme Court and Physician-Assisted Suicide: Rejecting Assisted Suicide but Embracing Euthanasia

Orentlicher says that in rejecting a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide, the US Supreme Court undermined the distinction between life-sustaining treatment & assisted suicide or euthanasia when it endorsed terminal sedation. This article discusses the practice of terminal sedation & argues that it is essentially euthanasia. Orentlicher questions why the Supreme Court justices expressly rejected the claim that terminal sedaton is “covert physician-assisted suicide”. (19 refs.)