ALBANY (LifeSiteNews) – New York’s long-dreaded physician-assisted suicide law finally takes effect on Wednesday, August 5, unleashing euthanasia on the Empire State and leaving objectors to fight for their conscience rights.
Signed by Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in February, the so-called “Medical Aid in Dying Act” allows patients given a prognosis of six months or fewer to live to be prescribed euthanasia drugs, upon affirmation by two doctors that they have “decision-making capacity.” Eligibility is limited to state residents, and the New York State Department of Health claims that a “long list of rigorous safeguards” are in place to prevent “abuse,” including a waiting period and that patients are informed of alternatives such as hospice and palliative care. A public feedback period closed August 3 on proposed regulations defining reporting requirements under the law.
But grave objections remain, both to the details of the new law and to the principle of facilitating suicide in the healthcare system. Last June, the New York Post editorial board called it “fundamentally about a reinvention of the medical profession: Out goes ‘do no harm,’ in comes a ‘calculation’ as to whether a given life is still worth living,” it continued. “With the state, and insurance companies, having a clear financial interest in ending ‘marginal’ lives and those whose care costs ‘too much.’”
Shortly before the law was slated to take effect, U.S. District Judge Orelia Eleta Merchant dismissed a lawsuit by disability rights activists arguing that the law constituted discrimination under the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, ruling that the challengers lacked standing.
However, another legal challenge remains active, by the Diocese of Rockville Centre and four communities of Catholic religious sisters (Carmelite Sisters for the Aged & Infirm, Little Sisters of the Poor, Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, and the Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict), who say that the law violates the First Amendment by forcing religious institutions that care for the elderly and terminally ill to participate despite their convictions.
“We will never submit to New York’s culture of death,” said Bishop John Oliver Barres. “Assisted suicide is a grave moral failure that puts the elderly, the disabled, and those suffering from mental and emotional illness at risk of abuse and manipulation. Christ the Divine Physician calls us to accompany the sick and dying with compassion, not abandon them to death. The court should protect that millennia-old mission.”
Physician-assisted suicide is currently legal in 14 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.”