¿Derecho a la salud o libertad?

A propósito de la soberanía que cada cual debiera tener sobre su salud, como un aspecto más de la elemental defensa de la libertad fundada en el derecho natural, encuentro muy interesante el artículo que Roger Pilon ha publicado en el WSJ (requiere subscripción, me temo).

Nos cuenta Pilon que hace un mes el Circuito de apelaciones de Washington DC resolvía que los pacientes terminales que fueran mentalmente capaces tenían derecho constitucional a emplear medicamentos que pudieran salvarles la vida, los hubiera o no aprobado la Food and Drug Administration , la FDA.

Una decisión “rica en implicaciones para la libertad médica y para la jurisprudencia constitucional”.

Jurisprudencia que se ha visto salpicada por las históricas controversias entorno al propósito de la Novena Enmienda, texto con el que los padres Fundadores (Madison, fundamentalmente) quisieron dar a los americanos un extra de protección frente al poder de los estados, incluyendo el federal. Una manera de recordar que frente a este poder los ciudadanos conservan su soberanía a través de una lista no determinada de derechos, por ejemplo los derechos naturales que muchos de los padres Fundadores veían fuera del alcance de cualquier poder del estado. Ahí va una primera cita (en inglés, lo siento):

"When they authorized judicial review, the Framers assumed that judges would have a grasp of the Constitution's natural rights and common law foundations. Unfortunately, today's judges are far removed from those foundations. The result is confusion, and divisive controversies.
Liberal judges, often hostile toward our founding principles, invent rights by drawing on their own conceptions of evolving social values. Reacting to the perceived judicial activism, conservative judges go overboard the other way, recognizing only those rights expressly "in" the Constitution -- thus ignoring the presumption of individual liberty at the very foundation of the document. Neither side gets it right. The Constitution no more authorizes judges to invent rights from whole cloth than it allows them to ignore rights plainly meant to be protected."

En fin, volviendo al caso de Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Development Drugs v. Eschenbach en el que el antes mencionado Circuito falló a favor de la Abigail Alliance, termina Pilon:

"Carefully following [the] more restrictive approach (to avoid the charge of activism), the court noted the precise description of the right the Abigail Alliance claimed, and then traced the history in America of the more generally described rights from which it is derived -- the right to potentially life-saving medication, the right to control one's body, the right to self-preservation and the right to life.
Finding those rights in the centuries-old common law, the court concluded that, in contrast to those ancient principles, it is the FDA's regulation of access that is new. Accordingly, if there is a fundamental right to refuse life-sustaining treatment, as the Supreme Court had found in 1990, there is, equally, a right to seek life-sustaining medication free from government interference.
That's hardly pulling a right "out of thin air," as the Washington Post charged editorially in its defense of FDA bureaucrats. It is not the freewheeling stuff of Roe v. Wade, but rather the careful mining of Locke, Blackstone and Madison.
To the layman, such judicial hermeneutics must seem tedious, for a simple question should settle the matter: Whose life is it, anyway? That it doesn't is a mark of how far we've strayed from our founding principles. Statutory schemes today have replaced common law, policy has replaced principle -- and transient majorities tell us what our rights are.”

Como dice Capella y tantos olvidan u obvian, porque, total, es sólo una papeleta cada cuatro años ( y gracias) “La persona libre es soberana en el ámbito de su propiedad, son sus decisiones las únicas éticamente relevantes, no hay otros que decidan en su nombre por la fuerza. Los demás pueden influir, pero no de forma coercitiva.”