WASHINGTON — While most Americans support doctor-assisted suicide, it is still bad public policy, a conservative Christian leader said Wednesday.

Catherine Glenn Foster of the Alliance Defending Freedom told an audience at the libertarian Cato Institute that public policies against unassisted suicide should hold true for assisted-suicide.

Also known as physician-assisted suicide and aid-in-dying, assisted suicide is when a physician knowingly provides patients who have requested it with the knowledge or means to end their lives with lethal doses of prescribed or unprescribed drugs.

“We always have the ability to kill ourselves, but assisted suicide is about ceding rights and not gaining them,” she said.