Assisted Suicide and the Illusory Poverty Component

Yoel Goldfeder

Georgetown University Law Center; Class of 1998

In this student note, Yoel Goldfeder argues that poor people will be not be disproportionately harmed if physician-assisted suicide is legalized. While opponents of assisted suicide have asserted that poor people will be compelled to seek death to relieve the financial burdens of terminal illness, Goldfeder argues that the evidence indicates the opposite. The poorest Americans, he states, are less likely to commit suicide than their middle and upper class counterparts. Given this evidence, the arguments by assisted suicide opponents do not stem from genuine concern for the poorest and sickest, but rather are powerful political arguments to support the movement to ban physician-assisted suicide.

Goldfeder first reviews the constitutionality of the "right to die" as it has developed from the interest in privacy, and discussed most recently in the Supreme Court's rejection of challenges to the New York and Washington prohibitions on physician-assisted suicide. Goldfeder then considers the asserted harms of assisted suicide on the poor, looking especially to the experience in the Netherlands, where doctors are not prosecuted for assisting a patient in suicide. Turning to the evidence in the United States regarding health care practices, suicide rates among poor people, and the expense of physician-assisted suicide, Goldfeder concludes that the poor are not more likely to commit suicide when physician-assisted suicide is legal.

Vol. V, No. 2, p. 335 (1998)

Revised July 17, 2003 (MD)