Right to Die and its Constitutional Validity.

"A living will provides clear and convincing evidence of one's wishes regarding end-of-life care"
Every person shall have the right to die with dignity; this right shall include the right to choose the time of one's death and to receive medical and pharmaceutical assistance to die painlessly. No physician, nurse or pharmacist shall be held criminally or civilly liable for assisting a person in the free exercise of this right.The Constitution of India provides a long list of fundamental rights under Part-III. Article 21( “Protection of Life and Personal Liberty) of our Constitution is one of the important fundamental rights among those rights.
Right to life means the right to lead meaningful, complete and dignified life. It does not have restricted meaning. The object of the fundamental right under Article 21 is to prevent any restriction by the State to a person upon his personal liberty and deprivation of life except according to procedure established by law.
Active voluntary euthanasia and physician assisted suicide should be legalized. Moral, religious, and ethical objections are ungrounded. The patient’s life should belong in his or her hands. Patients cannot be forced to live a life that is meaningless. According to Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary euthanasia is defined as “the act or practice of killing or permitting the death of hopelessly sick or injured individuals in a relatively painless way for reasons of mercy” (401). Euthanasia is Greek meaning “good death.”

The question arises whether right to life under Article 21 includes right to die or not. This question came for consideration for first time before the High Court of Bombay in State of Maharashtra v. Maruti Sripati Dubal. In this case the Bombay High Court held that the right to life guaranteed under Article 21 includes right to die, and the hon’ble High Court struck down section 309 IPC which provides punishment for attempt to commit suicide by a person as unconstitutional. In P Rathinam v. Union of India a Division Bench of the Supreme Court supporting the decision of the High Court of Bombay in. Maruti Sripati Dubal case held that under Article 21 right to life also include right to die and laid section 309 of IPC unconstitutional.
The right of a competent, terminally ill person to avoid excruciating pain and embrace a timely and dignified death bears the sanction of history and is implicit in the concept of ordered liberty. The right to refuse medical treatment and the right to abortion instructs that a mentally competent, terminally ill person has a protected liberty interest in choosing to end intolerable suffering by bringing about his or her own death. "Especially with regard to taking life, slippery slope arguments have long been a feature of the ethical landscape, used to question the moral permissibility of all kinds of acts... The situation is not unlike that of a doomsday cult that predicts time and again the end of the world, only for followers to discover the next day that things are pretty much as they were...We need the evidence that shows that horrible slope consequences are likely to occur. The mere possibility that such consequences might occur, as noted earlier, does not constitute such evidence."

Ramakant Gaur.
Advocate
Supreme Court of India
09810004702