As an aide to former President Bill Clinton, US Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan said that federal legislation criminalising doctor-assisted suicide was a “fairly terrible idea”, according to documents disclosed late last week. Other documents may reveal her views on abortion and cloning.

The handwritten note was released in a batch of 46,000 pages of records released by the William J. Clinton Presidential Library, potentially shedding some light on Kagan’s views on assisted suicide.

The note was reportedly prompted by the 1997 enactment of a right-to-die law in Oregon, which spurred an unsuccessful move by congressional Republicans to issue a federal ban overriding the statute.

At the time, Kagan was reviewing a draft of a Justice Department memo saying that the US Drug Enforcement Administration had insufficient power under the 1994 Controlled Substances Act to penalise doctors for prescribing life-ending drugs to terminally ill patients.

In a 1997 memo to Clinton, Kagan and another aide also allegedly opposed a ban on the production of human embryos for scientific research. Kagan and another aide wrote in response to a memo supporting a moratorium on human cloning: “Prohibiting the creation of embryos for research using private funds could halt important research on infertility and possibly other medical conditions”.

White House spokesman Ben LaBolt told Bloomberg Business Week that the documents “reflect Kagan’s efforts to advance President Clinton’s well-established policy agenda, and they should not be interpreted as an outline of her personal positions on specific policy issues.” ~ Bloomberg Business Week Jun 5