From Rights to Dignity: Applying Lessons from Physician-Assisted Death to the Movement for Reproductive Justice

Abstract

Physician-assisted death (PAD) began as a question of constitutional rights, framed in the public’s consciousness by several high-profile court battles as the “right-to-die.” Over the last twenty years PAD has been dramatically transformed from the right to die to an issue expressed as “death with dignity” that includes broad considerations of healthcare, dignity, privacy and decisional autonomy. By contrast, the abortion right has experienced the opposite legal trajectory and considerably less dynamic range. Originally inspired by broad feminist ideals as one aspect of a larger call for equality, over the last forty years it has been significantly narrowed to an almost exclusive focus on “choice.” In case law and legislation, the issue continues to be framed as a constitutional right to decide to terminate a pregnancy and has been less successful in engaging broader questions of reproductive justice such as dignity, equality, autonomy and healthcare. This article considers why these two issues have experienced such dramatically different legal outcomes despite the fact that they share a legal lineage and engage similar moral and ethical tensions. I conclude that a significant part of the answer lies in the fact that abortion was granted status as a constitutional right, and PAD was not. I use the comparison with PAD as a vehicle for exploring the limitation that the constitutional rights framework has imposed on the abortion right and to consider ways to apply the successes of PAD to similarly broaden the framing of the abortion right.