WASHINGTON — Most Jewish medical ethicists and legal activists welcome the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that terminally ill people do not have a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide.
“I understand the longing for a way out for people that are suffering,” said Rabbi Dayle Friedman, chaplain at the Philadelphia Geriatric Center, which serves about 1,000 elderly Jews.
“I just happen to think this is the wrong way,” she adds.
“There are an infinite amount of things that we can do to make the experience of dying better without putting in another human being’s hands the authority and the power to kill somebody.”
In a unanimous 9-0 decision last month, the court upheld laws in New York and Washington state that make it a crime for doctors to prescribe life-ending drugs to mentally competent, terminally ill patients who no longer wish to live.
Chief Justice William Rehnquist, whose wife died in 1991 after a long battle with cancer, wrote the main decision for the court in Vacco vs. Quill and Washington vs. Glucksberg.
He said the idea of someone helping another to commit suicide conflicts with “our nation’s history, legal traditions and practices.
“The difficulty in defining terminal illness, and the risk that a dying patient’s request for assistance in ending his or her life might not be truly voluntary, justifies the prohibitions on assisted suicide we uphold here.”
In most segments of the Jewish community, there is general agreement that the practice of physician-assisted suicide runs contrary to Jewish law.
A doctor’s first priority, most Jewish doctors and medical ethicists stress, is to save a patient’s life.
“From a Jewish perspective, doctor-assisted suicide is simply non-halachic; it violates a basic premise of Judaism,” said Rabbi Gerald Wolpe, head of the Jewish Theological Seminary’s bioethics institute and chairman of a bioethics advisory committee at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Yet at the same time, the conflict is that Judaism is extremely sympathetic to the easing of pain and suffering.”
Not everyone in the Jewish community holds Jewish law paramount in deciding this issue.
Indeed, Wolpe’s Conservative colleague, Dr. Samuel Klagsbrun, was one of the plaintiffs in the suit challenging the New York law banning physician-assisted suicide.
Klagsbrun, chairman of pastoral psychiatry at JTS and a leading advocate on the issue in the Jewish community, has said in the past, “We do our best to ease their suffering in management techniques, but there is a small number who can’t respond and beg to die earlier. That population should not be abandoned, as I believe it is now.”
Klagsbrun has said he regrets that his position runs contrary to Jewish law, but insists that doctors should be able to respond to suicide requests by the terminally ill.
While the right-to-die controversy has generated considerable debate in the Jewish medical community, most Jewish groups remained on the sidelines as the court was weighing in on the controversial issue.
Only Agudath Israel of America, which represents the ultra-religious, and the Orthodox Union filed friend-of-the-court briefs urging the justices to uphold the right of state governments to outlaw physician-assisted suicide.
David Zwiebel, general counsel and director of government affairs for Agudath Israel of America, said he was disappointed that more Jewish organizations chose not to weigh in on the issue.
“We as a Jewish community ought to have some special sensitivities about it in view of the euthanasia movement in Nazi Germany,” he said.