WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to hear the Bush administration's challenge to the nation's only right-to-die law, setting the stage for a showdown over whether states may permit doctors to prescribe drugs intended to end patients' lives.
The justices will decide whether Oregon's Death With Dignity Act violates federal drug-control laws. The case will be argued during the court's fall term.
Oregon's voters have approved the right-to-die measure twice. In 1994, the law passed 51% to 49%, but never went into effect because of a court ruling. In 1997, voters rejected an effort to repeal the law, endorsing it 60% to 40%.
The law extends a right to die only to capable adults who are diagnosed as "suffering from a terminal disease" that is likely to take their lives within six months. A second doctor must confirm that the patient is dying, acting voluntarily and competent to choose to end his or her life. Only then may a doctor prescribe lethal medication.
Hundreds of patients have consulted doctors and obtained lethal medication in the seven years since the law took effect, supporters of the law said; 171 have followed through.
"Many patients are comforted by having the medication that gives them the choice to hasten their death, but it is used rarely," said Kathryn L. Tucker, legal director for Compassion in Dying, the Portland, Ore., group that sponsored the law.
Traditionally, states regulate the practice of medicine and license physicians to work within their borders.
In 1998, conservatives in Congress, led by Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), urged federal action to block Oregon's law. But then-Atty. Gen. Janet Reno refused to intervene, determining that Oregon had set stringent rules to assure that only mentally competent terminally ill patients could obtain the medication.
But in November 2001, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said he would seek to punish doctors who prescribed the medication to dying patients, regardless of the wishes of Oregon's voters.
"I hereby determine that assisting suicide is not a legitimate medical purpose," Ashcroft said. Doctors who did so would be in violation of the federal Controlled Substances Act, he said, and would have their right to prescribe medicine suspended or revoked.
Ashcroft's order set in motion the legal battle to be heard by the Supreme Court.
