No, the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court declined to recognize that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and its protection of life, liberty, and property included a right to die. In Washington v. Glucksberg (1997), the Court determined that terminally ill patients did not possess such a constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide. Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote that there was a “consistent and almost universal tradition” of criminalizing the assisting of suicide. “The States’ assisted-suicide bans are not innovations,” he wrote. “Rather, they are longstanding expressions of the States’ commitment to the protection and preservation of human life.”

The Court had dealt with a related issue in Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health (1990). In that decision, the Court determined that a state could refuse to withdraw life support from a person in a vegetative state absent clear and convincing evidence that the patient would have wanted such a course of action. However, the Court said there was a clear difference between the two cases. Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote that there was a large distinction between assisted suicide and the refusal of unwanted medical treatment. He explained: “In Cruzan itself, … we certainly gave no indication that the right to refuse unwanted medical treatment could be somehow transmuted into a right to assistance in committing suicide.”