On December 17, Governor Kathy Hochul delivered New York’s far Left a grim Christmas gift: an agreement with the legislature on the Medical Aid in Dying Act (MAiD), a bill that would let terminally ill residents expected to live less than six months obtain a prescription to end their lives. After the legislature passed the bill in the spring, it lingered on the governor’s desk amid public hesitation. Hochul extracted a handful of concessions—limiting eligibility to New York residents, imposing a five-day waiting period before filling the prescription, requiring a mental-health evaluation of the patient, and permitting religiously affiliated health facilities to opt out. She said the bill will be passed and signed into law in January, taking effect six months later.
But these procedural guardrails do nothing to resolve the bill’s underlying ethical and philosophical ghoulishness. By legalizing physician-assisted suicide, the state would formally concede that suffering can justify ending one’s life—a dangerous and macabre message that life may cease to be worth living once it becomes sufficiently painful. There’s still time for Hochul to reconsider: she has not yet signed the bill.
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In an op-ed defending her decision, the governor peddles various false equivalences and red herrings. She opens by invoking the Founding Fathers, claiming that they established a nation committed to protecting rights including “privacy and bodily autonomy.”
Hochul’s cavalier misuse of history collapses under a passing familiarity with the nation’s constitutional tradition. These supposed rights appear nowhere in the Constitution, and no Founding-era American would have recognized them as such. The Supreme Court invented a constitutional “right to privacy” in 1965, derived tenuously from the Fourteenth Amendment, itself ratified nearly a century after the Founding. To project the modern concept of extreme bodily autonomy backward onto America’s origins is pure mythmaking to suit the Left’s political ends.
The historical reality is far different: suicide was a felony at common law—felo de se, a crime against oneself—because it violated the natural law of self-preservation and repudiated life as a gift bestowed by God. Those who took their own lives were denied Christian burial and interred at crossroads with a wooden stake driven through the bodies. Their property was forfeited to the Crown as punishment, as deterrence for others, and as compensation for the public obligations that the deceased would no longer fulfill. Whatever one thinks of these practices today, they bear little resemblance to Hochul’s fatuous interpretation of the Founders’ promise of “choice and freedom.”
On a personal note, Hochul recounts her mother’s degenerative death from ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s disease), but a careful reader will notice that the governor never claims that her mother asked for euthanasia. Instead, the anecdote inadvertently reveals what assisted suicide is often really about—the perceived burden that severe illness imposes on families and caregivers and the desire to eliminate such an imposition.
The governor writes that she reflected on this decision during a Catholic funeral Mass, concluding that “God is merciful and compassionate, and so must we be”—which, in her telling, apparently means offering the “merciful option” of a lethal drug cocktail to those “searching for comfort.” This is a poor attempt to sway less-informed religious readers using the cloak of sympathy. It inverts Catholic teaching, which has been clear and consistent for centuries: the Catechism states that intentional euthanasia, “whatever its forms or motives, is murder. It is gravely contrary to the dignity of the human person and to the respect due to the living God, his Creator.”
Hochul further argues that denying assisted suicide would “condemn” patients to excruciating pain. This claim ignores how modern medicine can alleviate even severe pain without resorting to intentional life-ending measures. Ethicists of many philosophical stripes—including the Catholic moral tradition—have long recognized the legitimacy of administering pain-relieving treatments that may foreseeably shorten life, provided that death is not the intended outcome. This principle of double effect preserves the physician’s role as healer and the crucial moral line between relieving pain and causing death.
The most unsettling passage in the governor’s op-ed is her portrayal of MAiD as allowing terminally ill New Yorkers to spend their final days at home, “with sunlight streaming through their bedroom window” and the “laughter of their grandkids echoing in the next room.” Putting aside the maudlin sentimentality, hospice-at-home services already make such deaths possible—without resorting to lethal drugs.
Experience from abroad and other states shows that assisted-suicide regimes do not remain confined to Hochul’s paradigmatic case of the terminally ill. In countries such as Canada, the Netherlands, and Belgium, eligibility has expanded since enactment, and the practice has become normalized, including even for children and dementia patients in the Netherlands. In Canada, assisted deaths now account for over 5 percent of total mortality, with documented cases often driven by loneliness, disability, and fears of poverty and homelessness. Oregon’s 2021 report on its assisted-suicide program documents deaths attributed to nonterminal conditions such as arthritis, hernia, kidney failure, and even complications from a fall.
If Hochul signs MAiD into law, New York would take its first step down this path. After all, why should some forms of suffering be sufficient to warrant assisted suicide, and others not? The principle of bodily autonomy has little reason to distinguish between the choice made by a stage-four cancer patient and one with severe and chronic psychiatric distress. In both cases, it is possible to conclude that neither person can be restored to health, which helps explain the steady expansion of eligibility in jurisdictions where assisted suicide is legal. Horror stories abound of government and health-care workers suggesting assisted suicide to veterans, former Paralympians, anorexia patients, and others.
True mercy and compassion do not consist in treating suffering as something to be erased because it is meaningless. Who among us hasn’t learned important lessons from periods of adversity? Suffering can likewise carry meaning: drawing the sufferer into deeper solidarity with others and fostering a general awareness that human beings are not self-sufficient, but bound together in mutual dependence and charity. There is no such thing as good suicide.
The real impetus behind Hochul’s move, unsurprisingly, is political. With progressives emboldened by last month’s mayoral election, she has chosen to accommodate the far Left before the next legislative session rather than risk a damaging fight.
Governor Hochul can still refuse to sign the bill. She need not abandon the principle of life’s fundamental worth for political expediency.
Photo by James Carbone/Newsday RM via Getty Images