Alito Confirmation Hearings: on Health Care

Samuel Alito: Ok to refuse medical treatment; but assisted suicide not ok

ALITO: This is obviously one of the most sensitive issues that comes up in our legal system. And with the advances in medical technology, this is going to be a very tough issue for an awful lot of people. In the Cruzan case, the court assumed that there is a constitutional right to refuse medical treatment that a person doesn't want. If somebody gives you medical treatment and you say I don't want it, and they perform an operation on you, that's a battery under the common law and you can be sued. And then in Washington v. Glucksberg, they addressed the issue of whether there was a constitutional right to assisted suicide, and they concluded that there was not. But they recognized that these were issues that were on the cutting edge of medical technology, on which more empirical evidence might become relevant in the future.