Sam Brownback at your deathbed

Brownback and other critics of physician-assisted suicide imagine that this highly constrained experiment in expanded autonomy for people on the verge of death will somehow devolve into a homicidal free-for-all featuring involuntary euthanasia and infanticide. This is like assuming that allowing women to get breast implants will lead plastic surgeons to start kidnapping those they deem insufficiently endowed and cutting into them without permission.

The main cautionary example cited by opponents of Oregon's law is the Netherlands, where doctors do not merely assist suicide but directly kill patients, sometimes without their consent. The most striking feature of the Dutch approach, as described by its critics, is that the rules, including the crucial condition of patient consent, are neither followed nor enforced. Whatever may be said for the Dutch pragmatism that, say, tolerates the retail sale of marijuana even though it's officially illegal, the distinction between suicide and homicide is an area where following the law should not be optional.

Instead of drawing clear lines, Brownback's bill would push doctors into a gray zone beyond the law. His ban is ostensibly limited to prescriptions "for the stated or undisputed purpose of assisting suicide," a restriction meant to protect doctors who prescribe narcotic painkillers that may incidentally hasten death by depressing respiration. If this safeguard is as strong as Brownback claims, doctors could always prescribe large doses of narcotics with a wink and a nod to patients who wanted to kill themselves. The upshot would be more lies, not fewer suicides.