Source: Buffalo News

By Philip Reed

Last week, a New York Appellate Court unanimously ruled that there is no constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide. This decision echoed two U.S. Supreme Court cases nearly 20 years earlier, in which the court ruled, also unanimously, that a ban on assisted suicide expresses a legitimate government interest in preserving life.

Proponents of the right to die pressed their case two decades later on the grounds that laws prohibiting assisted suicide do not apply to physicians helping terminally ill patients end their lives because this practice is not assisted suicide. Instead, it is “aid in dying.”