Weblogic

By the time I was 28 and pregnant with my first-born, I had already racked up many years of being “pro-life”—years that reached self-awareness roughly with passage of New York State’s liberalized abortion law in 1970, when I was 14, and that eventually ratcheted up from high-school and college debates into a professional career, so to speak, following the Roe v. Wade decision and the birth two years later of the Human Life Review.

So friends and more acquaintances than might normally be the case knew where I stood on abortion, although it was not a topic I preferred debating non-professionally if given the choice (pardon the loaded word). As a literally life-and-death issue, abortion mattered too much for comfortable dinner- table pyrotechnics; in addition, there was the risk of saying—or hearing from others—the kind of passionate, personal remarks that seldom seem to persuade, are hard to forget, and tend to have a distancing effect on friendly relationships. I write better than I speak; it seemed (and still largely seems) more sensible to refer people to the writing that conveys with accuracy and completeness what I think and feel. For the rest, there was something very attractive to me in St. Francis of Assisi’s advice to his friars: “Preach always. If necessary, use words.”

This boy didn't come to the big city dangling from the bed of a ’47 pickup, no, sir. He's been to a county fair or two, it's true, on which occasions he learned the value and necessity of standing delicately aside while rival pitchmen have at each other. This boy, in other words, has better things to do than arbitrate the very public spat over whether Wesley J. Smith, esteemed ethicist and contributor to the Human Life Review, hates or loves animals, or loves them insufficiently, or . . . whatever.

We all know, of course, what spat I am talking about. No? Let me reprise. Then we'll get on with the larger business.

“[W]e find nothing in Montana Supreme Court precedent or Montana statutes indicating that physician aid in dying is against public policy.”¹

On the last day of 2009, when the Montana Supreme Court handed down its decision in an assisted-suicide case, it marked the first time a state high court has given the green light for doctors to prescribe a lethal dose of drugs for their patients.

The decision was particularly tragic, given the fact that Montana already has the highest suicide rate in the nation, twice the national average.² This fact has prompted the legislature to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on suicide-prevention programs.³ But that didn’t stop the Court from making Montana the third state, after Oregon and Washington, to transform the crime of assisted suicide into a “medical treatment.” And, in the not-too-distant future, the Court’s decision could have a tremendous impact on states across the nation. This is due not only to the formal outcome of the case, but also to the fact that the Court dealt euthanasia and assisted-suicide activists a winning hand in a deadly serious name game: It decided to refer to assisted suicide, not as what it is, but as “aid in dying.”

Furthermore, it provided a new basis on which the right for physicians to assist suicides can be argued: as a mere extension of a state’s living-will law.