Free Euthanasia Essays: The Church and Assisted Suicide :: Free Euthanasia Essay

Church groups wrote to all members of Congress urging support for the lethal Drug Abuse Prevention Act of 1998. Excerpts follow   Swift turn of this legislation is necessary due to a seriously flawed popular opinion by U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno... The ruling asserts that Oregon, by rescinding its own cultivated and criminal penalties for assisting the suicides of certain patients, has established aided suicide as a legitimate health check practice within Oregons borders -- and that the federal government lacks both basis for disagreeing with this judgment. Under this ruling, however, federal intervention by the Drug Enforcement formation in Oregon may well be warranted in cases where a physician fails to comply with state procedures regarding how and when to assist suicides. Federal law bequeath protect the lives only of those deemed by the state to be ineligible for assisted suicide.   The Oregon assisted suicide law, in and of itself, poses an enormous thr eat to tender-hearted dignity and to equal protection of all citizens under law. While inveterate to forbid assistance in the suicide of a young and hearty person, this law rescinds criminal, civil and professional penalties for a doctor who assists the suicide of individual he or she believes in good faith to have half a dozen months to live. Ironically, once this good faith judgment is made it will neer be proved wrong, because the patient will be dead from a drug overdose in a few days. Oregons discriminatory insurance stigmatizes an entire class of penetrable patients as having lives not worth protecting. For this spring it has been found unconstitutional by the only federal court to check up on Oregons law on the merits. See Lee v. Oregon, 891 F.Supp. 1429 (D. Or. 1995), vacated on other grounds, 107 F.3d 1382 (9th Cir. 1997), cert. denied, 118 S. Ct. 328 (1997).   online federal policy demands an increased penalty when the victim of a hatred is seriously ill or otherwise unusually vulnerable (United States Sentencing Commission, Guidelines Manual, p. 227, 3A1.1). How, then, cease the federal government now adjust its penalties under the Controlled Substances Act to subscribe and enforce Oregons discriminatory policy on assisted suicide -- where the vulnerable condition of the victim turns a crime into a legitimate medical practice?   Any states rights argument on this issue is contradicted by the seeming(a) language and intent of the federal Controlled Substances Act.