Linda Jewell was just waking up on Thursday in Edmonds, Wash., when she heard the news. The radio announced that the Supreme Court had sustained a Washington State law forbidding the terminally ill from enlisting doctors' help in committing suicide. Jewell, 58, who has advanced ovarian cancer and an aversion to a bedridden, IV-tubed future, was bitterly dismayed. "I felt a heaviness in my heart," she says. "I've always been a law-abiding citizen, but I think this is a moral right."
At first hearing, the court's dual, unanimous decisions on assisted suicide (the second addressed a New York case) constituted a...