Editor's note: The following is excerpted from "Death March," by Wesley J. Smith, which appeared in the Feb. 23 issue of National Review magazine.
In a recent
talk Kathryn Tucker, the [Compassion in Dying] Federation's legal-affairs
director, demonstrated how the Federation actually regards the "protective
guidelines" it always claims will shield the vulnerable. One of the
most important of these protections is the mandatory waiting period between
the request for death and the issuance of the lethal prescription. Oregon's
law requires a 15-day wait -- not too long, surely, considering the irreversibility
of the action. Miss Tucker now says that even this is "overly restrictive."
Extrapolating from Planned Parenthood v. Casey and other "reproductive
rights" cases, she expects the courts will "immediately"
strike down the waiting period as "unduly burdensome."
If so, why did advocates such as Barbara Coombs Lee, the Federation's executive
director and co-author of the Oregon law, include the waiting period in
the first place? Miss Tucker's candor is breathtaking: "In the legislative
forum, to pass [assisted-suicide laws], you need to have measures that convince
people that it's suitably protective." She also claims that when the
Supreme Court recently declined to create a constitutional right to assisted
suicide, it instead created a constitutional right to pain control -- so
watch for litigation seeking to re-label euthanasia as "pain control."
Thus, it becomes ever more clear that even when activists speak of protections
and limitations, terminal illness and suicide, what they are actually working
to
permit is the intentional killing by doctors of a wide variety of vulnerable
human beings.