by David R. Carlin Jr.

About the author: David R. Carlin Jr. is a reporter for Commonweal, a magazine edited by Catholic laypeople.

In early March 1996, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, in the case of Compassion in Dying v. State of Washington, announced the discovery of a new "fundamental right" in the United States Constitution, a right to assisted suicide.

Finding Nonexistent Rights

It's amazing what can be seen with these new judicial microscopes, developed by the same people who made the Hubble telescope. It has been more than a century-and-a-quarter since passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and more than two centuries since the Bill of Rights, yet in all this time no one's eyesight was acute enough to discover this right. Using a high-powered judicial microscope, however...