c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Robert F. Drinan is a Jesuit priest, former member of Congress and professor of law at Georgetown University.)

(RNS)-Whatever the verdict may be in Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s trial on charges of violating Michigan’s ban on assisted suicide, his conviction or acquittal will not resolve the ambivalence most Americans have about mercy-killing.

In a 1991 Gallup poll, 58 percent of those surveyed said a terminally ill person has “the moral right” to end his or her life. Sixty-five percent believed doctors should be allowed by law to end a patient’s life by some painless means if the patient and his or her family request it.

But when it comes to actually crafting a law that grants a terminally ill person the right to end his or her life, the apparent moral consensus so easily articulated in opinion polls quickly unravels.

We are ambivalent about physician-assisted suicide because of a gut-level understanding that if people are given the power to end their lives, the most vulnerable and least productive members of society could well be denied their right to exist.

The conflict people feel about assisted suicide plays itself out in voting booths, legislative chambers and courtrooms all over America.

-Voters in Washington state rejected physician-assisted suicide in 1991; California voters defeated a similar measure a year later. Oregon voters approved an assisted-suicide measure in 1994, but it is now being challenged and will likely go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

-All 50 states have repealed laws that once declared suicide a criminal action. But 27 states have approved laws in recent years that outlaw assisted suicide.

This widespread moral and legal confusion is partly due to our rapidly aging population. In 1950, there were 580,000 Americans over the age of 85. In 1990, there were 3.1 million. By 2005, there will be 5.3 million Americans 85 or older. And almost every one of us has witnessed elderly loved ones living out their last days in less-than-happy circumstances.

Also increasing is the number of people wasting away with AIDS or other incurable illnesses. Shouldn’t the law provide a rational and responsible way for them to die with dignity?

Religion provides some answers-but not all.

Roman Catholics and other traditional religious groups oppose all forms of suicide, asserting that God alone determines the time our earthly pilgrimage will end.

But God often works through human actions. And the Catholic Church, for instance, has made it clear that physicians and guardians of incurably ill people may withhold treatment or withdraw extraordinary measures that prolong life.

In 1971, U.S. Catholic bishops stated that “it is not euthanasia to give a dying person sedatives and analgesics for the alleviation of pain, when such measures are deemed necessary, even though they may deprive the patient of the use of reason, or shorten his life.”

It was a useful statement issued early on in the debate over the end of life. But it does not relate to difficult cases of those gravely ill with cancer or AIDS, who may live for years, but not benefit from powerful sedatives.

Religion alone cannot resolve the knotty legal question of whether the government has any compelling reason to deny its citizens the right to die.

The American Civil Liberties Union recently filed suit in Florida to overturn a ban on doctor-assisted suicide, arguing that the government cannot interfere with a terminally ill person’s decision to die. The three plaintiffs in the suit contend that the law making it a felony to assist in an act of “self-murder” is an unconstitutional infringement of a mentally competent, terminally ill patient’s right to privacy.

This right to privacy is the key argument advanced by a broad array of individuals and groups intent on legalizing physician-assisted suicide.

They argue that the Supreme Court has made it clear that the government may not interfere with the right of a woman to beget and bear a child, the right of men and women not to be castrated or sterilized and the right of all to marry any person regardless of race. All persons, they argue, should be immune from any intervention by the state in the most intimate decisions of life-including the right to die.

On Wednesday (March 6), the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco struck down Washington state’s ban on assisted suicide. Declaring the Constitution protects the right to die, it was the first time a federal court made such a ruling.

The right to die is too complicated an issue to be resolved by any single court decision, be it the Washington state ban on assisted suicide, the case of Dr. Kevorkian or the privacy argument of the ACLU. But one thing is certain.

For hundreds of years, our moral convictions, spiritual intuitions and legal traditions have affirmed that no person should be assisted in an act of self-destruction. If exceptions to that principle are to be made in the name of privacy and the right to die with dignity, we will have to proceed carefully, understanding the reasons for our ambivalence.

MJP END DRINAN