(LifeSiteNews) – Bishop Thomas Paprocki, four Catholic doctors, and a Lutheran center are suing the state of Illinois over its assisted suicide law, saying that it will force religious healthcare providers to participate in euthanasia against their consciences.
As covered last November by LifeSiteNews, standalone legalization legislation failed to make it through either Democrat-controlled chamber of the state legislature earlier in the year, but activists had greater success smuggling it into an unrelated bill on food sanitary preparation rules. The amendment states that “Medical aid in dying is part of general medical care and complements other end-of-life options, such as comfort care, pain control, palliative care, and hospice care.”
Democrat Gov. JB Pritzker signed the bill the next month, defying a direct appeal from Pope Leo XIV. The law requires someone who wishes to undergo euthanasia to make the request to end his or her life both verbally and in writing, then repeat it verbally at least five days after the initial request. Multiple Illinois health systems have since declared that they will refuse to participate.
On Tuesday, the Thomas More Society announced that it was representing Diocese of Springfield’s Bishop Thomas John Paprocki, the Lutheran Care Center, and four Catholic physicians in a lawsuit maintaining that the law “threaten[s] the integrity of religious healthcare institutions’ identity and mission by requiring them to allow their own employees to promote assisted suicide on premises, and to assist in patient suicides off-site” without discipline or termination; and that because the law “decrees that its procedures ‘do not constitute suicide [or] assisted suicide,’ a vaguely worded and overtly viewpoint-based ban on ‘misinformation to obstruct access’” would imperil “any health care facility that calls assisted suicide what it is and distinguishes it from legitimate health care.”
“Illinois is forcing faith-based hospitals, nuns, and doctors into supporting the state’s assisted suicide regime,” said Thomas More’s Peter Breen. “The law commands Catholic hospitals, religious nursing homes, and faithful doctors to promote suicide’s alleged ‘benefits,’ refer patients to suicide drug prescribers, and then lie on death certificates to cover it up. This immoral scheme flagrantly violates religious liberty and free speech rights, and we intend to stop it.”
“At the heart of the Catholic Church’s healthcare ministry is the healing work of Christ—to stand with the suffering, to comfort the dying, and to affirm the God-given dignity of every human life,” added Bishop Paprocki. “Illinois’s assisted suicide law undermines that mission by forcing Catholic hospitals and those who serve in them to push death onto their most vulnerable patients. We must be free to serve the sick and the dying according to our faith, not according to the state’s mandate.”
Physician-assisted suicide is currently legal in fourteen states plus the District of Columbia, with legalization measures pending in a dozen more.
As Patients Rights Action Fund (PRAF) executive director Matt Vallière has argued, current euthanasia programs in the United States constitute discrimination against patients with life-threatening conditions in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act, as when a state will “will pay for every instance of assisted suicide” but not palliative care, “I don’t call that autonomy, I call that eugenics.”
Live Action’s Bridget Sielicki further notes that “because a paralytic is involved, a person can look peaceful, while they actually drown to death in their own bodily secretions. Experimental assisted suicide drugs have led to the ‘burning of patients’ mouths and throats, causing some to scream in pain.’ Furthermore, a study in the medical journal Anaesthesia found that a third of patients took up to 30 hours to die after ingesting assisted suicide drugs, while four percent took seven days to die.”