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59 New Eng. L. Rev. F. 1 (2025)

handle is hein.journals/remand59 and id is 1 raw text is: It's Not About How We Die, But How We Live: A Look at Physician-Assisted Suicide in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts1 Marcus DiBacco* INTRODUCTION The inevitability of death is one commonly met with fear, depression, and anxiety, but by one way or another, all life must end.2 If death is natural, then [w]hat's wrong with death ... ? What are we so mortally afraid of,? Why can't we treat death with a certain amount of humanity and dignity ... ?3 Philosophers contemplated these and similar questions relating to suicide throughout history.4 Plato, for example, condemned the act and suggested it be punished by denying the actor the normal burial rites practiced at the time; however he allowed for four exceptions, including what he referred to as extreme and unavoidable personal misfortune.5 In Anglo-American history, the common law forbade suicide outright and punished those who committed it.6 Jurisdictions repealed these laws because they impacted the actor's family who were already suffering the loss of their loved one, rather than the actor.7 Discussion on how the law and society address suicide changed over time and continues to do so.8 In 1868, the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution afforded all 1 THE LAST SAMURAI, at 2:16:45-2:16:55 (Warner Bros. 2003) (demonstrating that when life inevitably concludes, how one lived his life is far more important than how it ended). * J.D. Candidate, New England Law I Boston (2025). 2 Atara Wertentheil, Death Is Inevitable: Learning How Not to Fear It, LONG ISLAND PSYCH. PLLC (July 30, 2022), https://perma.cc/SGM4-WES3. 3 PATCH ADAMS, at 1:41:21-1:41:31 (Universal Pictures 1998). 4 See Univ. of Utah, THE ETHICS OF SUICIDE DIGIT. ARCHIVE, https://perma.cc/FF4A-D4UA (last visited Jan. 17, 2024). 5 Michael Cholbi, Suicide § 2.1, STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA PHIL., https://perma.cc/XCA7-2U23 (last updated Nov. 9, 2021). 6 Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 711-12 (1997). 7 Id. 8 See generally id. at 710-18. 1

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