Assisted Suicide To sanction the taking of innocent human life is to contradict a primary purpose of the law in an orderly society. A law or judicial decision allowing assisted suicide would diminish the lives of vulnerable patients and expose them to exploitation by those who believe they would be better off dead. Such a policy would corrupt the medical profession, whose code of ethics calls on doctors to serve life and never kill. Those who have no voice or are marginalized in our society – the poor, the frail elderly, racial minorities, millions of people without health insurance – would be the first to feel the pressure to die. And what about competent terminally ill patients who say they really want it? assisted suicide? The suicidal desires of terminally ill patients are no less due to treatable depression than the same desires of able-bodied people. When addressing their pain, depression and other issues, suicide is generally no longer discussed. If we respond to the death wish of one group of people with suicide counseling and prevention, and we respond to the same wish of another group by offering them lethal drugs, we have made our tragic choice as a society that some people's lives are not objectively it is worth protecting. How does cost come into this question? In an era of cost controls and managed care, patients with persistent disease may be labeled an economic liability, and decisions to encourage death may be cost-driven. As acting U.S. Attorney General Walter Dellinger warned, urging the Supreme Court to uphold laws against assisted suicide: “The least expensive treatment for any disease is a lethal drug.” Why are people with disabilities concerned about assisted suicide? Many people with disabilities have long experience with prejudicial attitudes from able-bodied people, including doctors, who say they "would rather be dead than disabled." Such biases could easily lead families, doctors and society to encourage death for depressed and emotionally vulnerable people as they adjust to life with a serious illness or disability. To speak here of a "free choice" for suicide is a dangerously misleading abstraction. What is the point of view of the medical profession? The American Medical Association maintains that "physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician's role as healer." The AMA, along with the American Nurses Association, the American Psychiatric Association and dozens of other medical groups, urged the Supreme Court to uphold laws against assisted suicide, arguing that the power to assist in patients' deaths is "a power that most health has." health workers do not want and cannot control.