A federal court has given Catholic healthcare providers temporary protection from portions of Illinois’ new assisted-suicide law, just one day before the controversial statute is scheduled to take effect.
The development comes after Cardinal Blase Cupich of the Archdiocese of Chicago, two Catholic religious orders and an Illinois pharmacist filed a federal lawsuit arguing that the state cannot force religious healthcare providers to participate in, facilitate or promote practices that violate their convictions about the sanctity of human life.
The lawsuit, Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm v. Prince, was filed September 3 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.
The plaintiffs include the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm, the Little Sisters of the Poor, Cardinal Cupich and Catholic pharmacist Luke Vander Bleek.
On September 11, attorneys with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty reported that a federal judge had temporarily blocked Illinois from enforcing the challenged assisted-suicide requirements against their clients while the litigation proceeds.
Illinois’ End-of-Life Options for Terminally Ill Patients Act is scheduled to take effect September 12.
The law permits qualifying terminally ill adults to obtain medication intended to end their lives.
According to reporting on challenges to the law, eligibility generally requires a patient to be diagnosed with a terminal condition expected to result in death within six months, receive confirmation from physicians, demonstrate mental capacity and make the required requests for the medication.
The Catholic plaintiffs are not challenging the law merely because they disagree with assisted suicide.
Their lawsuit focuses on whether Illinois may require religious healthcare professionals to participate in conversations or procedures that they believe make them complicit in suicide.
Becket argues that provisions of the law require healthcare providers to discuss assisted suicide among available end-of-life options and restrict providers from discouraging patients from pursuing it.
The religious-liberty organization says those requirements amount to compelled speech and forced participation in conduct directly contrary to Catholic teaching.
For Catholic healthcare ministries, opposition to assisted suicide is not a peripheral political position.
Catholic moral teaching holds that intentionally causing an innocent person’s death is impermissible, including when the person is suffering or terminally ill. Catholic institutions instead emphasize hospice care, pain management, spiritual support and accompaniment through natural death.
The plaintiffs say Catholic healthcare institutions have served sick and elderly residents of Illinois for generations.
The Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm and Little Sisters of the Poor operate ministries specifically dedicated to caring for elderly and vulnerable people.
Becket notes that Catholic healthcare ministries have been serving patients in Illinois for nearly 175 years.
The lawsuit argues that the state is placing those ministries in an impossible position: either violate deeply held religious convictions or risk government penalties.
The plaintiffs are also challenging restrictions they say interfere with the ability of Catholic healthcare workers to give patients life-affirming counsel.
The case therefore presents two overlapping First Amendment questions: free exercise of religion and freedom of speech.
It also raises a broader issue likely to become increasingly important as assisted-suicide laws expand across the country.
Even where government permits assisted suicide, can it require religious doctors, hospitals, nurses or pharmacists to participate?
Illinois officials and supporters of medical aid in dying argue that terminally ill patients should be able to receive complete information about legally available treatment options.
Supporters contend the law contains safeguards intended to protect patient choice and ensure that only qualifying patients receive life-ending medication.
The Catholic plaintiffs do not deny that Illinois has enacted the policy.
Their argument is that the First Amendment prevents the government from forcing them to personally facilitate it.
The temporary protection obtained September 11 does not represent a final ruling on the constitutionality of the statute. Litigation will continue.
But for the Catholic ministries involved, it means the law can take effect without immediately requiring them to choose between their faith and penalties from the state.
A Christian Perspective
This case reaches far beyond Catholicism.
Evangelicals, Baptists, Reformed Christians and other believers may disagree with Roman Catholic theology on important matters, but Christians across denominational lines should recognize what is at stake when government tells a religious caregiver: You may hold your belief privately, but your professional conduct must contradict it.
Religious liberty becomes meaningless if it protects belief only inside a church building.
Jesus’ command to care for the sick was not limited to Sunday morning.
Christians established hospitals, orphanages, shelters and ministries precisely because faith is meant to be practiced.
The Christian response to suffering is not to pretend suffering is easy. Terminal illness can involve terrible pain, fear, exhaustion and heartbreaking decisions for patients and families.
Those people deserve extraordinary compassion.
But compassion and intentionally ending a life are not synonymous.
Christian teaching has traditionally recognized a fundamental difference between allowing natural death when treatment has become futile and deliberately causing death.
That distinction matters.
Genesis teaches that human beings bear the image of God. Psalm 139 speaks of God’s knowledge of human life before birth. Throughout Scripture, human worth is not measured by strength, productivity, age, health or independence.
That becomes particularly important when someone becomes weak.
A society reveals much about its values by how it treats people who cannot offer anything in return.
Christians should therefore defend both things at once: compassionate care for terminally ill people and conscience protection for medical professionals who believe helping cause a patient’s death would violate God’s command.
Government may enact laws Christians consider profoundly mistaken.
But government should never possess unlimited authority to commandeer a believer’s conscience.
The Illinois case will continue, and the final constitutional questions remain unresolved.
For now, the court has preserved an important principle while those questions are considered:
Catholic sisters who have spent their lives caring for the dying will not immediately be forced to help patients end their lives in order to continue serving them.
That is not merely a Catholic issue.
It is a religious-liberty issue every American Christian should be watching.
Primary sources: Becket’s case page, September 3 complaint and September 11 court update.
