That means we have to wait a few more months before we know if we have on our hands another disastrous Supreme Court decision concerning life and death. The Court's 1973 ruling on abortion unleashed a quarter-century of social unrest, promoted the lessening of respect for human life and greased the slippery slope that has brought us 1.3 million abortions every year.
In other words, if you don't like what happened to America after Roe v. Wade, pray hard that the Court doesn't repeat its errors. Pro-lifers warned us two decades ago where abortion was leading: toward abortions being done for sex selection (and they are), toward infanticide (and we have partial-birth abortions), toward handicapped babies being killed at birth (and they have been) and toward the terminally ill being targeted (as they are right now).
It's not too difficult to extend that warning. If the terminally ill are permitted to get a doctor's help in dying, it's a short step to a doctor making the decision without the patient's request. That's already happened in Holland where physician-assisted suicide has led to hundreds of people being killed by their doctors on the doctors' whim.
And if doctors can decide to kill the terminally ill, why not the elderly? Why not children with AIDS? Why not teenagers with leukemia? They all are burdens on society and produce nothing worthwhile -- if we define "worthwhile" the way it has been defined by those who support physician-assisted suicide.
A society that disposes of humans with the careless disregard we have for tossing out empty milk cartons is doomed to become a wasteland. Respect for life is not just an abstraction; it is a way of life that requires diligent effort to hold the hand of dying people, constant perseverance to demand better treatment for them and firm strength of character to stand against a tide that cries, "They shoot horses, don't they?"
Yes, they do. But if we don't know the difference between humans and horses, we have far deeper problems than any Supreme Court decision can engender.