Justice & Law Quote by Maggie Gallagher

Gallagher’s line lands like a cold splash of legal realism: the state can police actions, but it can’t fully police agency. “No law can give or take away” frames suicide not as a moral debate first, but as a question of jurisdiction. The subtext is almost deflationary: legislation loves to posture as omnipotent, yet here it hits the hard limit of what law can actually do inside a person’s private calculus.

The sentence is built to sound obvious, which is part of its force. “Choice” does a lot of work. It quietly shifts the conversation from sin or sickness to autonomy, a word that can make both libertarians and civil-liberties liberals nod along. At the same time, it’s a provocation to policy-minded readers who want clean solutions: if law can’t remove the choice, then bans and penalties risk becoming symbolic punishment layered onto despair rather than prevention.

Context matters because Gallagher, a writer known for cultural and family-values arguments, isn’t merely making a libertarian point. The intent can read as a warning shot at the fantasy that legalization or criminalization settles the ethical stakes. Even if you outlaw assisted suicide or normalize it through statute, the interior fact remains: people can still decide to die. That’s unsettling precisely because it implies the real levers are social, medical, and relational - care systems, loneliness, pain management, stigma - all messier than a bill.

It works rhetorically by shrinking the distance between policy and the raw human act, forcing a reader to admit that law often arrives after the crisis, not before it.