New York became the 13th state to legalize physician-assisted suicide with the passage of a law dubbed the Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD) Act, which is set to go into effect in August.
Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul signed the act into law on Feb. 9, claiming the law extends “dignity and compassion” to the terminally ill and citing her mother’s battle with ALS.
Pro-life ethicists and leaders, meanwhile, lamented the law’s passage.
“For over 10 years, disability rights advocates, patients’ rights advocates, and representatives of various faith traditions banded together to stop the state of New York from passing the Orwellian legislation Gov. Kathy Hochul signed today,” the New York Alliance Against Assisted Suicide said in a Facebook post. “We fought hard, fought well, and fought for an honorable cause. While this stage of the legislative battle over assisted suicide did not end as we hoped, we are pleased to have substantially delayed the enactment of this lethal and insidious measure.”
The legislature passed the bill in December, but the governor’s signature was delayed as lawmakers negotiated details of how the law would be implemented.
The sixth-month period before the law goes into effect forces the state’s health department to establish added regulations for implementing the law, the governor’s office said in a statement, and will allow health providers time to “prepare and train staff for compliance.”
Among other things, candidates for MAiD must be New York residents diagnosed as terminally ill with a life expectancy of six months or less. They must also be evaluated in person by a physician, and by a psychiatrist or psychologist to establish mental competency.
Even so, some observers worry the temptation to coerce vulnerable populations of people into assisted suicide is a danger, as seen in Canada recently.
Dr. Brick Lantz, vice president of advocacy and bioethics with the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, told CBN News, “We expect there’s possibly more dominoes that will fall as far as other states legalizing assisted suicide, which we find, of course, very unfortunate. And we’re following the footsteps of Canada, which has legalized throughout the entire country.”
“It is up to the medical community to advocate for those who are near death,” Lantz said. “And I think that the influence should go into palliative care, improving palliative care, because there is a way to die well.”
Other states with laws allowing assisted suicide are California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington.
Ten years after Canada first allowed assisted suicide for those whose deaths were “reasonably foreseeable, the practice has gained increasing scrutiny for being more liberally applied than first conceived. Canada’s Parliament in 2023 approved regulations to implement regulations allowing the practice for people with mental illness, but that has now been delayed until 2027.
That 2023 expansion, wrote Canadian academic Yuan Yi Zhu, has “made a mockery of our society’s commitment to mental health and suicide prevention.”
