Libertarians and others who want to keep government out of people's lives argue that everyone has the right to commit suicide—at any time and for any reason— because people own their own bodies. As Libertarian Party chairman Steve Dasbach contends, "Like the right to life, [the right to die] is a basic human right that predates the Constitution and is protected by it. It can be neither granted nor taken away."

At the opposite extreme, the Roman Catholic Church, one of the most influential opponents of suicide, holds that people's bodies belong to God and therefore no one ever has the right to commit suicide. In his 1995 encyclical letter Evangelium Vitae, Pope John Paul II writes:

Suicide is always as morally objectionable as murder. The Church's tradition has always rejected it as a gravely evil choice. Even though a certain psychological...