The Wall Street Journal-20080122-Should Courts Intrude on the Terminally-Ill-
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Should Courts Intrude on the Terminally-Ill?
On Jan. 11, the Supreme Court rejected our petition asserting that terminal cancer patients with no options left but death have a right to assume the risk associated with taking promising investigational drugs ("A Different 'Right to Life,'" Stephen Walker, op-ed Jan. 11). The U.S. urged the court to deny review until the issue has "percolated" in the lower courts for more years or decades, and a conflict develops between various federal circuits. We are very saddened that the court would postpone review of such a profoundly humane issue. In the time it will take for this issue to make its way back to the Supreme Court tens of thousands of Americans will die unnecessarily.
The court is hearing a case this very term about whether Americans have a right to defend their lives by handgun. It shouldn't have evaded the far easier question of whether Americans have a right to defend their lives by taking investigational drugs that could not possibly harm anyone but themselves.
We have argued that it cannot possibly be the law (as it appears to be now) that a dying patient has a constitutional right to trust her own doctor's judgment rather than the government's under conditions of reasonable medical uncertainty, if, but only if, the treatment happens to be abortion. That means our case is bound up with all the complicated judicial politics surrounding abortion, which may also have made the court reluctant to grant review. Two premises of our case were closely aligned with two major premises supporting abortion, e.g., the decision should remain between physician/oncologist and pregnant mother/cancer patient; the rationale for this private decision is to protect the health of the mother/cancer patient.
It is a massive tragedy if we allow our reasonable disagreements about Roe v. Wade to obscure or defeat the most basic rights of Americans. Terminally-ill cancer patients have a Fifth Amendment right to "life," and the Declaration of Independence guarantees the "unalienable Rights . . . of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness."
Ronald L. Trowbridge
Volunteer Adjunct Scholar
Board Director
Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs
Conroe, Texas
