Advance directives were born in the Senate. Now they can help preserve the dignity of its aging members.
In Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, the parents of Nancy Cruzan, a young woman who had been left in a permanent vegetative state after a car accident, wanted the right to remove her life support. In 1990, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of her parents, affirming the constitutional right to refuse life-sustaining treatment.
In the wake of that ruling, Sens. John Danforth and Daniel Patrick Moynihan authored the Patient Self-Determination Act (PSDA). They were responding to Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion, in which she lamented that Nancy Cruzan had not formally expressed her preferences for life-sustaining therapy in advance.
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