HELENA – Three friend-of-the-court briefs ask the Montana Supreme Court to reverse a lower-court ruling that Montanans have a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide.
The state of Montana is appealing the ruling and many other amicus briefs on both sides of the issue are expected before the state Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the case later this year.
On Tuesday the Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative legal group, filed a brief on behalf of the Family Research Council, the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Catholic Medical Association and several Montana physicians.
“Legalizing assisted suicide diminishes compassionate treatment of pain because … assisted suicide encourages the elimination of patients themselves rather than of their suffering,” the brief states. “The dignity and privacy rights of vulnerable patients require that they not be propelled into a society where they can be successfully pressured to die.”
Last week the International Task Force on Euthanasia & Assisted Suicide also filed a brief seeking to overturn the lower-court ruling. And earlier this month a similar brief was filed by another opponent, the Physicians for Compassionate Care Education Foundation.
“Physicians have the duty to safeguard human life, especially the lives of the most vulnerable members of our society,” the latter brief says. “Physicians should use their knowledge, skills and compassion in caring for and supporting their patients. The practice of medicine should never be used intentionally to cause death.”
The Dec. 5, 2008 ruling by Helena District Judge Dorothy McCarter said that mentally sound, terminally ill Montanans have a constitutional right to choose to end their lives using medication prescribed by doctors.
“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,” McCarter said.
The ruling came in the case of a Billings man with terminal cancer, who was joined in the lawsuit by four physicians who treat terminally ill patients and a nonprofit patients’ rights group.
With the ruling Montana joined Oregon and Washington as states that allow dying patients to end their lives with a doctor’s assistance if their suffering becomes too great to bear.
McCarter refused to issue a stay pending appeal, so the order is in effect unless the state Supreme Court issues a stay or ultimately overturns it.
However, terminally ill patients say they’re having trouble finding physicians willing to prescribe drugs that would hasten their deaths.
After McCarter’s December ruling, the Montana Medical Association adopted a policy that states the group “does not condone the deliberate act of precipitating the death of a patient.”
The policy states the organization “does not accept the proposition that death with dignity may be achieved only through physician-assisted suicide.”