Article On Assisted Suicide And Abortion

David Busscher (J.D., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2015) recently published an article entitled, Linking assisted suicide and abortion: life, death, and choice, 23 Elder L.J. 123-149 (2015). Provided below is an abstract of the article:

Assisted suicide is a politically controversial issue that particularly affects the elderly. Many of the legal and ethical concerns raised in the context of abortion are also raised in the assisted suicide debate, yet there has been little use of the precedents set by abortion law in the debates surrounding assisted suicide. Tensions between the values advocated by assisted suicide proponents, such as Jack Kevorkian and Compassion & Choices, and the value of human life, reflected in the Hippocratic Oath and by religious faiths, are addressed in court decisions on abortion. This Note compares the treatment of the inherent value of life and the state’s interest in protecting life in decisions regarding abortion and assisted suicide. The author proposes that the state’s unqualified interest in the value of life necessarily leads to the conclusion that once life begins, the state may preserve it, even against the wishes of the individual.