Law Commons^™

The Constitutional Right To Make Medical Treatment Decisions: A Tale Of Two Doctrines, Jessie Hill

Jessie Hill

The Supreme Court has taken very different approaches to the question whether individuals have a right to make autonomous medical treatment choices, depending on the context. For example, in cases concerning the right to choose “partial-birth” abortion and the right to use medical marijuana, decided just one year apart, the Supreme Court reached radically different results, based on radically different reasoning. In Stenberg v. Carhart, the Supreme Court recognized an almost absolute right to choose a particular abortion procedure if the procedure is the safest for the woman, refusing to defer to the state’s view of the relevant medical facts. …