Chris Van Buskirk
masslive.com
Originally posted 6 Dec 22
The state’s highest court ruled Monday morning that the Massachusetts state constitution does not protect physician-assisted suicide and that laws around manslaughter may prohibit the practice.
The decision affects whether doctors can prescribe lethal amounts of medication to terminally ill patients that would end their life. The plaintiffs, a doctor looking to provide physician-assisted suicide and a patient with an incurable cancer, argued that patients with six months or less to live have a constitutional right to bring about their death on their own terms.
But defendants in the case have said that the decision to legalize or formalize the procedure here in Massachusetts is a question best left to state lawmakers, not the courts. And in an 89-page ruling, Associate Justice Frank Gaziano wrote that the Supreme Judicial Court agreed with that position.
The court, he wrote, recognized the “paramount importance and profound significance of all end-of-life decisions” but that the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights does not reach so far as to protect physician-assisted suicide.
“Our decision today does not diminish the critical nature of these interests, but rather recognizes the limits of our Constitution, and the proper role of the judiciary in a functioning democracy. The desirability and practicality of physician-assisted suicide raises not only weighty philosophical questions about the nature of life and death, but also difficult technical questions about the regulation of the medical field,” Gaziano wrote. “These questions are best left to the democratic process, where their resolution can be informed by robust public debate and thoughtful research by experts in the field.”
Plaintiff Roger Kligler, a retired physician, was diagnosed with stage four metastatic prostate cancer, and in May 2018, a doctor told him that there was a fifty percent chance that he would die within five years.
Kligler, Gaziano wrote in the ruling, had not yet received a six-month prognosis, and his cancer “currently has been contained, and his physician asserts that it would not be surprising if Kligler were alive ten years from now.”
