Argumentative Essay: The Right To Die Campaign

The “right to die” movement has been a thoroughly debated issue over the past hundred years, and although there has been much support for assisted suicide, there has also been a strong effort to undermine this movement. In 1906, a Democratic Congressman named Henry Hunt introduced the first euthanasia bill in United States history into the General Assembly of Ohio , however this bill quickly failed to pass, setting a trend that lasted eighty-eight years, until the Death with Dignity Act was passed in Oregon in 1994 . As the first state to permit some terminally ill patients to determine the time of their own death, Oregon re-opened a historically one-sided debate on whether or not the “right to die” was a right that was protected by the …show more content…
COMMERCIAL SPEECH DOCTRINE AND ITS APPLICABILITY TO THE FINAL EXIT NETWORK As an organization that regularly advertises, The Final Exit Network is provided protection under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing the protection of the freedom of speech . However because the speech used by The Final Exit Network publicly offer’s to assist an individual in the commission of suicide, this speech shall be considered commercial speech, which shall be reviewed under intermediate scrutiny . Protection, however, has not always been offered to speech that is deemed “commercial” by way of advertising . In 1942, the Supreme Court upheld a city ordinance prohibiting the distribution of commercial and business materials on public streets, when a man distributed pamphlets advertising a his submarine on one side and protesting docking facilities on the other . This opinion that “purely commercial advertising” was not protected under the first amendment was the first major opinion to address the limits of commercial speech, however the decisions of many cases since have evolved the framework of protection granted to commercial speech under the first …show more content…
FINAL EXIT NETWORK, INC. et al. v. STATE OF GEORGIA, AS REVIEWED BY THE GEORGIA SUPREME COURT Although this paper argues that Final Network v. Georgia should be reviewed under intermediate scrutiny using the Central Hudson test, when this case was tried in 2012, the legislation regarding assisted suicide was not the same law that it is today. Due to the error in writing the statute, the Georgia Supreme Court believed that the law was appropriately reviewed under strict scrutiny. The history leading up to this case, and a discussion of the decision will provide as to why there was an error in the writing of the legislation, and why the Georgia Supreme Court ruled in favor of Final Exit Network, Inc.
In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s there were numerous instances of support and dissent of assisted suicide taking place across the United Stated. There were bills introduced in state legislatures