Reading the Mystery Passage Narrowly: a Legal, Ethical and Practical Argument Against Physician Assisted Suicide

The proponents of physician assisted suicide argue that language in the Supreme Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey establishes a right to hasten one’s own death. This Note argues that the Supreme Court should read the language in Casey narrowly rather than broadly for 3 reasons: 1) in light of Supreme Court precedent, people erroneously extracted the language from the Court’s Casey opinion when they applied it broadly to physician assisted suicide, 2) reading the language in Casey broadly does not comport with a basic philosophical system called limited universalism, & 3) the Note explains the real concerns of the slippery slope argument when reading this Casey language broadly.