IRVINE, CA--Oregon's assisted suicide law has survived an attack by the Bush administration, but only because a legal technicality allowed a federal court to sidestep the key moral issue.

"The real issue," says Thomas A. Bowden, a Baltimore attorney and senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute, "is whether each individual lives by right, or only by society's permission." The American system, he adds, is built on the moral principle that each individual exists as an end in himself, with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

"Sometimes happiness becomes impossible to attain, as in the case of a painful, terminal illness," Bowden observes. "The right to life includes and implies the right to commit suicide. If society can require you to go on living, despite your better judgment, then your life does not belong to you, and you exist by permission, not by right."

Oregon's assisted suicide law permits terminally ill patients to ask their doctors for lethal doses of drugs, to be used, or not, by the patient at his own discretion. Attorney General John Ashcroft had attacked the Oregon law under the federal Controlled Dangerous Substances Act, but a federal appeals court held that Ashcroft's gambit infringed on the states' traditional power to regulate the practice of medicine.

Bowden rejects the "slippery slope" argument that equates assisted suicide, a voluntary act, with involuntary euthanasia of the old and infirm. "The only slippery slope we should worry about," Bowden insists, "is the one that results from declaring that individual lives belong to society, to be disposed of by majority vote. That's the slippery slope that eventually leads to oppression, dictatorship, and mass death."

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Thomas A. Bowden, an attorney and a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute, is available for interviews.

Contact larryb@aynrand.org or (800) 365-6552 ext. 213.