New York Deserves Better than State-Sanctioned Suicide

Over the past two weeks, the world has witnessed a tremendous outpouring of love for Pope Francis, who died on Easter Monday, April 21. His last public appearance was just the day before as he struggled to give his Easter blessing from the balcony overlooking St. Peter’s Square. Our Holy Father, always a wise teacher, was not afraid to let us watch him die, much like his beloved predecessor, Pope St. John Paul II. Both men knew that our worth is based on who we are as children of God, not on what we can do.  

Perhaps that is why what occurred this past Tuesday in Albany when the New York State Assembly voted 81–67 to approve a bill that would allow physician-assisted suicide, which its supporters euphemistically call “medical aid in dying,” struck me so hard.

This bill is a disaster waiting to happen. 

For people of faith who believe in the sanctity of life from conception to natural death, the very idea of having a doctor give you a prescription to end your life prematurely is contrary to everything we cherish. When life ends is in God’s hands, not man’s. As the Bible says, no one knows the day or the hour.

But one need not be religious to see that assisted suicide is a terrible idea. It is a classic Pandora’s Box; once opened, its consequences cannot be contained.

The experience in places where physician-assisted suicide is already in effect shows this will go in directions New York’s many well-meaning lawmakers may not envision. As legendary baseball manager Casey Stengel was fond of saying, you can look it up—in the proposed legislation and in the suicide advocates’ own words and deeds.

In the New York legislation sponsored by Assemblywoman Amy Paulin and state senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, doctors would be forced to lie on death certificates by claiming the cause of death was the person’s underlying illness and not what actually killed him or her—the lethal combination of drugs. Any legislation that requires doctors to lie for the record cannot be good for the public.

The suicide bill comes as Gov. Kathy Hochul has implemented numerous highly successful suicide prevention efforts that are helping New York have one of the nation’s lowest suicide rates. Those programs are embedded throughout schools, pediatrician practices, hospitals, veterans and first responder initiatives, the 988 crisis hotline, and many other state and local programs. 

I commend Gov. Hochul for her efforts. But a new law that sanctions suicide while the state simultaneously pursues a policy of suicide prevention amounts to cutting holes into one side of a boat while bailing water from the other.

Worse, it sends a message to our young people—who are already struggling through an unprecedented mental health crisis—that life is disposable and that it’s perfectly alright to end your life if you find it burdensome or feel hopeless. “Even one death by suicide is too many,” New York State’s Office of Mental Health declares. Why anyone in our government would want to contradict that statement is beyond me.

The Catholic Church in America has a long and proud history in health care. We opened America’s first hospitals. We’ve cared for the casualties of war, measles, homelessness, illness, violence, AIDS, and all diseases and ailments known to man. We’ve also cared for our fellow humans’ emotional, psychological, and spiritual ailments.

State-sanctioned suicide turns everything society knows and believes about medicine on its head. Doctors go from healers to killers, which is why the American Medical Association calls it “fundamentally incompatible” with good medicine.

This legislation doesn’t require doctors to ask people if they’ve contemplated suicide before or find out if they’ve ever been treated for depression, paranoia, dementia, anxiety, anorexia, or any other mental health condition. And nowhere does the bill say a medical consultation must be in person, meaning it could happen by Zoom.

How is this compassion? Is it any wonder that insurance providers are often supporters of assisted suicide legislation, wanting to protect their bottom line from patients who might live an extra few weeks or months with proper care?

There are many more reasons to oppose physician-assisted suicide—from its impact on people with disabilities, to what it means for low-income people already poorly served by the health care system, to elderly people who feel they may be a burden on their families. (No wonder legislators with many constituents who are poor or marginalized expressed opposition.)

But I’ll leave you with this one: Under the bill advanced by Paulin and Hoylman-Sigal, the prescribing doctor doesn’t even have to be the patient’s regular provider. In fact, the national group “Death with Dignity” tells patients they could “ask any kind of doctor . . . even your dermatologist [emphasis added]” to write a suicide prescription. 

I can see how well-meaning lawmakers might support the notion of physician-assisted suicide as a means to relieve suffering. After all, nobody wishes others to suffer at the end of life. However, advances in hospice and palliative care, and new pain alleviating medicine, temper the effects of suffering. These lawmakers need only visit our own magnificent Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, a world leader in hospice care, to see how end-of-life care can be peaceful, devoid of suffering, and, yes, a moment of great grace for the patient and his or her family.

Elected officials have a duty to carefully consider the effects of the legislation before them. What is proposed as compassion for the suffering terminally ill, once enacted, becomes almost a duty, as the elderly, the disabled, and the sick feel pressured to end their lives and stop being an inconvenience to others. We’ve seen this happen in other states and countries that have enacted this fearsome legislation. Remember how abortion supporters’ mantra of  “safe, legal, and rare” was quickly cast aside, and now abortion is imposed, frequent, and something to be celebrated. The same is true for assisted suicide.

All stages of life provide lessons—to ourselves and others—but perhaps none more so than life’s end, as Pope Francis so eloquently taught. 

I was heartened by the outpouring of praise from so many upon Pope Francis’s passing. Paulin, the lead sponsor of New York’s assisted suicide bill, called Francis a “profoundly compassionate and forward-thinking leader” and “a remarkable Pope for the Catholic Church but a true moral compass for all people.” Gov. Hochul called him a “man of peace and a fighter for justice” and ordered flags flown at half-staff in his memory.

Pope Francis had much to say about assisted suicide in 2019: “[O]ne can and must reject the temptation—induced also by legislative changes—to use medicine to support a possible desire for death by the patient, providing assistance to suicide or causing death directly with euthanasia.” He called assisted suicide a “discarding of the patient” and “false compassion”—not, as its advocates might claim, an expression of a person’s freedom. New York and all our states can do better than this. Let us instead focus our formidable efforts on strengthening care for people at the end of life. They are finishing the race. Let them go with their hands held high, the way God and nature intended.