Such is the demographic paradox of a junior physician’s relationship with his patients: I worry about how to extend their lives. This anxiety inevitably shortens my own.

If freedom means anything at all, it is the right to primacy in regard to sexuality, reproduction, medical care and death.

Much as constitutional guarantees of press freedom do little good for prospective publishers if they do not have access to paper or ink, the right to aid in dying is strikingly useless if nobody is willing to help.

Most people are far more concerned that they can control their own bodies than they are about petitioning Congress.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between asking to be permitted to keep a vegetative relative on costly machinery, and asking the taxpayers or society as a whole to pay for such machinery.

I would prefer to believe that a market in fetal organs would empower women to use their reproductive capabilities to their own economic advantage.

A free society, to be truly worthy of that name, owes healthy, competent individuals the right to end their lives on their own terms.

The cold, cruel reality is that with one current justice now approaching ninety, and four others over seventy, the day will inevitably arrive when a sitting justice lies in an intensive care unit, both unable to resign and unable to resume his or her duties.

Maybe that is the greatest of wonders: that we can be shaped so much by those we’ve known closely, and equally by those we’ve never known at all – and that we too can change the world long after we’ve left it.

Be optimistic. Always put on clean underwear if you’re going on a date.