by Marcia Angell

About the author: Marcia Angell is executive editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Editor’s note: The following viewpoint was written in response to the Supreme Court’s 1997 decisions in Washington v. Glucksberg and Vacco v. Quill, in which the Court ruled that terminally ill patients do not have a constitutionally protected right to physician-assisted suicide.

No one trusts the dying to know what they want. The U.S. Supreme Court found dying patient have no right to decide for themselves to cut short their suffering by asking their doctors to prescribe an overdose of sleeping pills or painkillers. According to the court, it is not a decision for patients and doctors, but for state legislatures, most of which have laws on the books prohibiting doctor-assisted suicide...