Issue of Personal Choice: The Competent Incurable Patient and the Right to Commit Suicide, The

Medicine has made many advances in prolonging life artificially. As a result, people who in the past would have been sent home to die, can have life prolonged for months and years by artificial medical technology. These people are in limbo, alive, but not having life. American society has great reverence for life including, apparently, the kind of life that may be given through artificial life-prolonging procedures.

Consequently, the quality of a patient's life, many times is eclipsed by the medical profession's ability to sustain that patient's physical existence through artificial medical procedures. This Article hypothesizes that an incurably-ill competent individual has the right to affirmatively act to end his life when, after appropriate medical treatment, his life no longer has quality to him.