Ashcroft's Decree Threatens Doctors' and Patients' Rights

By Thomas A. Bowden

The irony was so rich it could be lost only on a strict religious conservative like U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft.

The date was November 6, 2001, just weeks after Islamic fundamentalists had launched terrorist attacks on New York and Washington for the purpose of forcing America's submission to the will of Allah--and here was John Ashcroft, launching a scare attack on Oregon doctors for the purpose of forcing their submission to the will of God.

The doctors Ashcroft targeted that day in his official enforcement memo were those who, in full compliance with a 1997 Oregon law, dared to assist their patients' suicides by prescribing lethal quantities of federally regulated drugs. According to Ashcroft's decree, such prescriptions serve no legitimate medical purpose, and so federal drug enforcement agents were to locate each participating doctor and revoke his federal license to dispense drugs--a professional death sentence for any physician.

What followed immediately was a court challenge by the State of Oregon, whose voters had legalized doctor-assisted suicide under strict procedures designed to ensure that a patient's free will coincided with a physician's objective judgment that suicide was a reasonable option. Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether Ashcroft's gambit was legal, and whether the Controlled Dangerous Substances Act can be used to frighten doctors into ignoring their patients' desperate entreaties. But in the meantime, one thing is clear: there is no rational, secular basis upon which the government can properly prevent any individual from choosing to end his own life. Rather, it is religious mysticism that energizes Ashcroft and the Bush administration into intimidating doctors who dare to defy God's divine plan.

The conservatives' outrage at the Oregon doctors stems from the belief that human life is a gift from the Lord, who puts us here on earth to carry out His will. Thus, the very idea of suicide is anathema, because one who plays God by causing his own death, or assisting in the death of another, insults his Maker and invites eternal damnation, not to mention divine retribution against the decadent society that permits such sinful behavior.

When religious conservatives like Ashcroft use secular laws to enforce their idea of God's will, they threaten the central principle on which America was founded. The Declaration of Independence proclaimed, for the first time in the history of nations, that each person exists as an end in himself. This basic truth--which finds political expression in the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness-means, in practical terms, that you need no one's permission to live, and that no one may forcibly obstruct your efforts to achieve your own personal happiness.

But what if happiness becomes impossible to attain? What if a dread disease, or some other calamity, drains all joy from life, leaving only misery and suffering? The right to life includes and implies the right to commit suicide. To hold otherwise--to declare that society must give you permission to kill yourself--is to contradict the right to life at its root. If you have a duty to go on living, despite your better judgment, then your life does not belong to you, and you exist by permission, not by right.

For these reasons, each individual has the right to decide the hour of his death and to implement that solemn decision as best he can. The choice is his because the life is his. And if a doctor is willing to assist in the suicide, based on an objective assessment of his patient's mental and physical state, the law should not stand in his way.

If petty ayatollahs like John Ashcroft can strike down state laws simply because they offend God Almighty, then we are on our way to the establishment of a theocracy--government by clergymen. To see where that road ends, just look at the Arab nations whose religious dictators declare that Allah wants America destroyed. If we inject religion into our own politics, we will be assisting in our own national suicide.

Were John Ashcroft to contract a terminal disease, he would have a legal right to regard his own God's will as paramount, and to instruct his doctor to stand by and let him suffer, just as long as his body and mind could endure the agony, until the last bitter paroxysm carried him to the grave.

But Ashcroft has no right to force such mindless, medieval misery upon doctors and patients, in Oregon or elsewhere, who refuse to regard their precious lives as playthings of a cruel God.