MARINA DEL REY, CA--If a doctor is willing to assist a patient in taking his own life, based on an objective assessment of the patient's hopeless mental and physical state, the law should not stand in his way, said attorney Thomas Bowden, a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute.
      But because Attorney General John Ashcroft accepts the religious view that human life is a gift from God and that man has a duty to obey God's plan for him, Ashcroft rejects the idea that an individual has the right to take his own life. So Ashcroft has attacked Oregon's 1997 law legalizing doctor-assisted suicides--by ordering the revocation of the federal drug licenses of those Oregon doctors who assist their patients' suicides with lethal drugs. Loss of this license is a professional death sentence for any physician.
      "When religious conservatives like Attorney General Ashcroft use secular laws to enforce their idea of God's will, they threaten the central principle on which America was founded," said Bowden. This principle "finds political expression in the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The right to life includes and implies the right to commit suicide. To hold otherwise--to declare that society must give you permission to kill yourself--is to contradict the right to life at its root. And if we inject religion into our politics, we will be assisting in our own national suicide."
      "Eventually," said Bowden, "the United States Supreme Court will decide whether Ashcroft's drug-license gambit is legal, and whether the Controlled Dangerous Substances Act can be used to frighten doctors into ignoring their patients' desperate entreaties. But in the meantime, one thing is clear: there is no rational, secular basis upon which the government can properly prevent any individual from choosing to end his own life."

ARI senior writer Thomas A. Bowden is available for interviews on this topic.