I believe many people who support the legal right to suicide are caring individuals who want to remove suffering and support the individual's right to self-determination. To these, it seems close-minded to legally oppose the right to suicide because they believe nobody has a right to impose their morals on anybody else.

      The fact is, all lawmaking imposes morality, since all laws declare one behavior right and another behavior wrong. Whether a law supports or opposes suicide, it is imposing morality.

      Laws supporting suicide impose the morality that the supreme value is the right to individual freedom of choice. If there is no authority higher than the individual, we have the right to kill ourselves. Suicide is death with dignity because it is efficient and the individual's choice.

      If the supreme value, instead of personal freedom, is the right to life given by God, a person doesn't have the moral authority to take his own life. The question, therefore, over whose morality to impose, appears based on the origin of life. Our country was founded on the view that life comes from God, as the Declaration of Independence asserts and as is supported by Constitutional Amendments and the laws throughout our nation's history opposing the right to suicide. Autonomy does not include the right to do harm to others or to ourselves.

      We don't owe our lives to ourselves. Our rights are not given to us by any government or individual (including ourselves). What we owe the dying and depressed nis not a seductively efficient death, but loving support for the remainder of their lives.

      Laws are a reflection of a society's values, and also advance and protect those values. Since we need laws and laws inevitably impose morality, it seems prudent to promote laws that are based on uncompromised reverence for the core dignity and worth of each human person. We need to emphatically oppose anything that devalues human life and its Creator.

Annie Bukacek MD