HELENA, Mont. — Attorneys with the Alliance Defense Fund filed a friend-of-the-court brief Monday with the Montana Supreme Court that asks for the reversal of a lower court ruling that found a “right” to physician-assisted suicide in the Montana Constitution. ADF filed its brief on behalf of the Family Research Council, the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Catholic Medical Association, and numerous Montana physicians.
“Doctors are licensed to heal, not to kill. It should seem obvious, but the law should never allow private individuals to poison one another,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Steven H. Aden.
“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. Their lives are valuable and protectable by law.”
On Oct. 18, 2007, two men, along with some doctors and the suicide advocacy organization Compassionate Choices, filed suit in state court to decriminalize physician-assisted suicide in Montana. On Dec. 5, 2008, a judge ruled that the Montana constitutional rights of individual privacy and human dignity included the “right” of a terminally ill patient to be killed by a doctor at the patient’s request. The state has now appealed the decision to the Montana Supreme Court.
“A right to assisted suicide is inconsistent with our legal system, built upon the bedrock principle of equality of each human being,” said Bill Saunders, human rights counsel and senior fellow and director of the Center for Human Life and Bioethics at the Family Research Council. “As experience in the Netherlands shows, legalizing euthanasia or assisted suicide leads to doctors deciding which lives are worth living, fundamentally corrupting the doctor-patient relationship.”
- Brief filed in State of Montana v. Baxter
ADF is a legal alliance of Christian attorneys and like-minded organizations defending the right of people to freely live out their faith. Launched in 1994, ADF employs a unique combination of strategy, training, funding, and litigation to protect and preserve religious liberty, the sanctity of life, marriage, and the family.
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