Assisted suicide violates ‘unalienable rights’

By Phil Lawler ( bio - articles - email ) | Jan 28, 2026

The most memorable sentence in the Declaration of Independence proclaims:

We hold these truths to be self-evidence, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

What is an “unalienable” right? The term “unalienable” (interchangeable with “inalienable”) ordinarily refers to rights that cannot be taken away from an individual. But it also means that these rights cannot be surrendered by the person who holds them.

If you are endowed with an unalienable right to life, then you cannot give away that right. You cannot give a doctor permission to end your life, because that permission is not yours to give. Thus laws that allow for physician-assisted suicide are a direct affront to the spirit of our country’s founding document.

The Declaration of Independence does not, by itself, carry the force of law, and what follows cannot be classified as a constitutional argument. But the Constitution is based on the principles set forth in the Declaration. On this point those principles align with the basic principles of Christian morality. The signers of the Declaration, whatever their particular religious beliefs, were formed in a tradition that regarded suicide as a serious crime—a crime, because the man who committed suicide exercised a power that was not properly his own.

We commonly think of rights as belonging to individuals. But the law can also recognize rights belonging to other entities: corporations, for example, or families. The English system of estate law has provided for “entailed” property, allowing a family to ensure that its estate would remain intact, to be passed down perpetually through successive generations. That system allows for complicated inheritances (familiar to anyone who has read the novels of Trollope or Austen), in which someone has full rights to an estate, except that he cannot sell off certain pieces of the property that are regarded as essential to the family estate. We might think of these as “unalienable” pieces of property; the family has determined that no one should be entitled to sell them.

In the Catholic Church, canon law regulates the “alienation” (sale) of parish properties, and stipulates that the bishop needs the consent of the diocesan financial council and the college of consultors before he, in turn, can approve the sale of valuable church properties. “The diocesan bishop himself also needs their consent to alienate the goods of the diocese.” Here too, under ordinary circumstances the bishop has full rights to control the use of church properties within his diocese, but that right does not give him unrestricted authority to sell (alienate) “temporal goods which belong to the universal Church.”

The same concept, if not the same language, is at work in ordinary real-estate transfers. I own a home, and regard that home as my private domain, over which I exercise a sort of sovereignty. No one can enter the house without my permission; to me it is a home, but to outsiders it is foreign territory. But if I sell my home, I “alienate” it; it becomes foreign territory to me.

Fortunately my wife and I have full legal authority to sell our home, and I suppose eventually we shall. The rights that we acquired when we purchased the home are alienable; we can renounce them whenever we wish, for whatever price we choose to accept.

But the right to life, the Declaration tells us, is unalienable. We cannot renounce that right. Because it is not a right that we purchased, earned, or inherited. It is a gift. And the Giver of that gift did not grant us absolute rights over the “property” that is our life. It is, one might say, entailed. We have complete freedom to use the gift during the course of our lifetime, but we do not have the authority to sell it or renounce it. It is, again, unalienable.

On this point, the Declaration of Independence accords with the constant teachings of the Catholic Church. So when Catholics fight against the legalization of assisted suicide, they are not engaged in a sectarian crusade. We are defending the “self-evident” truths on which our nation is founded.