EDITORIAL: If Catholic Gov. Kathy Hochul signs the bill, as she is expected to do, New York’s doctors will have been granted a license to kill some of their state’s most vulnerable and marginalized residents.
Let’s pull no punches — Monday was an utterly tragic day for New York State and for the entire nation.
The reason: The Empire State’s Legislature has now passed a bill legalizing so-called “medically assisted suicide.” As a result, if Gov. Kathy Hochul signs the bill as expected, New York’s doctors will have been granted a license to kill some of their state’s most vulnerable and marginalized residents.
Writing in National Review, Catholic journalist and pro-life advocate Kathryn Jean Lopez rightly compared what her home state has just done to its disastrous decision to legalize abortion in 1970.
As in the case of abortion, New York isn’t breaking new ground all by itself when it comes to sanctioning assisted suicide, the other hallmark Culture of Death legislative action. Eleven other states and the District of Columbia have done so earlier. But for better or for worse, New York remains the nation’s opinion leader, so legalizing this kind of medicalized killing carries a particularly heavy weight when it happens there.
Assisted suicide activists anchor their arguments for doctor-assisted suicide in bogus claims of “compassion” and “autonomy.” But the American Medical Association, whose membership of doctors is vastly more competent to judge what’s compassionate for patients than are these pro-death activists, continues to formally reject assisted suicide.
“AMA’s position on physician assisted suicide is not a position of neutrality, establishing that the profession of medicine should not support the practice of physician assisted suicide or see it as part of a physician’s role,” the AMA categorically reaffirmed recently, in its 2025 House of Delegates Handbook.
Indeed, medical professionals who work specifically in palliative care, assisting patients suffering due to terminal illnesses, stress that those who want to end their lives almost always desire this primarily because they feel abandoned, not because of their physical sufferings. Considering this reality, authentic compassion should spur us to redouble our efforts to accompany these suffering souls. This, rather than callously discarding them to legally sanctioned medicalized deaths, is the only way to allow them to complete their lives with authentic human dignity.
“Autonomy” is an equally flimsy argument, as witnessed by the ever-increasing litany of abuses that have occurred since Canada implemented its national Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) law in 2016. Despite the supposed safeguards in place, Canadian patients who are hospitalized with terminal illnesses are frequently pressured to consider MAID even though they have not requested any discussion of ending their own lives.
Canada has also widened the application of the law to include people with nonterminal illnesses, resulting in an exponential increase in the number of MAID deaths since its introduction. And the ruling Liberal regime has signaled that it wants to expand MAID even further to apply to people with mental illnesses — even though such persons obviously have impaired capacities to make autonomous and informed decisions about ending their own lives.
This is the same deadly road that New York is now poised to traverse. Dennis Poust, the executive director of the state Catholic conference, accurately described the bill’s passage as “a dark day for New York State.”
Something that makes the situation even darker is that the bill’s advance reveals the significantly diminished influence the institutional Catholic Church in the U.S. has in the public square. If the Archdiocese of New York, as large and visible as it still is, can’t fend off such a legislative attack on human life despite the concerted efforts of Cardinal Timothy Dolan, how can smaller dioceses and Catholic conferences do so in other liberal-leaning states?
Still, Cardinal Dolan and his brother New York bishops aren’t giving up the fight.
Citing the negative experiences of Canada and the other well-documented harms that are inextricably associated with the push for assisted suicide, they are still hoping to persuade Gov. Hochul, who last year signed legislation and announced a statewide campaign for suicide prevention, to break with liberal orthodoxy by vetoing the legislation.
While that prospect admittedly seems unlikely, at this point that’s the last remaining hope for opponents of medically assisted suicide in New York.
