778
Souter, J., concurring in judgment
U. S., at 172. Constitutional recognition of the right to bodily integrity underlies the assumed right, good against the State, to require physicians to terminate artificial life support, Cruzan, supra, at 279 ("[W]e assume that the United States Constitution would grant a competent person a constitutionally protected right to refuse lifesaving hydration and nutrition"), and the affirmative right to obtain medical intervention to cause abortion, see Casey, supra, at 857, 896; cf. Roe v. Wade, 410 U. S., at 153.
It is, indeed, in the abortion cases that the most telling recognitions of the importance of bodily integrity and the concomitant tradition of medical assistance have occurred. In Roe v. Wade, the plaintiff contended that the Texas statute making it criminal for any person to "procure an abortion," id., at 117, for a pregnant woman was unconstitutional insofar as it prevented her from "terminat[ing] her pregnancy by an abortion 'performed by a competent, licensed physician, under safe, clinical conditions,' " id., at 120, and in striking down the statute we stressed the importance of the relationship between patient and physician, see id., at 153, 156.
The analogies between the abortion cases and this one are several. Even though the State has a legitimate interest in discouraging abortion, see Casey, supra, at 871 ( joint opinion of O'Connor, Kennedy, and Souter, JJ.); Roe, 410 U. S., at 162, the Court recognized a woman's right to a physician's counsel and care. Like the decision to commit suicide, the decision to abort potential life can be made irresponsibly and under the influence of others, and yet the Court has held in the abortion cases that physicians are fit assistants. Without physician assistance in abortion, the woman's right would have too often amounted to nothing more than a right to self-mutilation, and without a physician to assist in the suicide of the dying, the patient's right will often be confined to crude methods of causing death, most shocking and painful to the decedent's survivors.
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