Suicide ruling should not stand

Inter Lake editorial

Montana now has the dubious distinction of being only the third state to legalize assisted suicide, thanks to the dubious logic of a district court judge who massaged the rights to privacy and human dignity until they were transformed into the right to die.

Judge Dorothy McCarter of Helena wrote in her ruling, which was released Friday, that, "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." She also said that the patient's right to die with dignity shields the assisting physician from being prosecuted under the state's homicide laws.

That is a neat trick by the judge, who essentially has substituted herself for the "body politic" of Montanans who crafted the state Constitution, as well as usurping the power of the Legislature to make laws for how we shall govern ourselves.

It is nice to know that the judge has given a lot of thought to these issues, and if she were a philosopher it might be enjoyable to listen to her arguments, but unfortunately she is a judge, and thus her arguments have the power to end human lives. That power should not be taken lightly.

It is certainly hard to imagine that the framers of the state Constitution envisioned that their language in Article II, Section 4 - "The dignity of the human being is inviolable" - could ever be twisted to sanction suicide. Probably many of those framers believed just the opposite - that human dignity guarantees the preservation of life, not its extinction.

As for the right - enshrined in Article II, Section 10 - of "individual privacy," it is tempered by acknowledgement that it can be infringed with the "showing of a compelling state interest." Virtually all lawmaking pays homage to this idea, since otherwise there would be no behavior or action which could be punished if it occurred in the privacy of one's own home.

The state clearly has a compelling interest in protecting human life, and if it gives that right up to a district judge, we had better all be worried about the future of the state and of ourselves. There are some who already see in McCarter's ruling the potential for much more than legal assisted suicide - that it would essentially force the state to ultimately accept "suicide on demand."

It should also be noted that even in Oregon and Washington, where physician-assisted suicide is legal, this right was granted not by a judge, or even by the elected legislature, but by the people themselves - in the form of ballot initiatives. Considering the extreme and irrevocable nature of suicide, that seems to be the only reasonable way to proceed.

Attorney General Mike McGrath intends to appeal McCarter's ruling to the state Supreme Court, which will hopefully say that the district judge overstepped her bounds. In the meantime, he has asked her to put the decision on hold, and in that we certainly, wholeheartedly, concur.