New York Legalizes Physician Assisted Suicide
New York recently joined a growing list of states that allow physician-assisted suicide, bringing the total to thirteen states plus Washington, DC. The law was signed in early February and marks a dramatic shift in how end-of-life choices are regulated in America. That change raises immediate questions about safeguards, medical ethics, and who bears the burden of these decisions.
Governor Kathy Hochul explained her choice in deeply personal terms, saying it was “an incredibly difficult decision,” and that “my mother died of ALS, and I am all too familiar with the pain of seeing someone you love suffer and being powerless to stop it.” Her comments put a human face on a law that touches raw emotions and private grief. Yet personal experience and public policy operate on different tracks, and the tension is at the heart of the debate.
Putting The Vulnerable At Risk
Critics warn the law could put vulnerable people in harm’s way by normalizing assisted death as an answer to social and economic problems. Matt Sharp with Alliance Defending Freedom warned that states allowing physician-assisted suicide are creating risks for “those with disabilities” and “older Americans,” suggesting the change could affect standards of care. He added, “We’ve seen time and again, when you pass these laws, there becomes this sense of coercion of those individuals to say, ‘Oh, you’re too much of a burden on your family, or you’re too much of a drain on the medical system,’” a concern that cuts to power dynamics in families and institutions.
New York state’s Catholic bishops have stated several times that physician-assisted suicide “is in direct conflict with Catholic teaching on the sacredness and dignity of all human life from conception until natural death and is a grave moral evil on par with other direct attacks on human life.”
Others in the medical advocacy world have made similar points about momentum and precedent. “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,” said a representative of a medical ethics group. Those warnings suggest the debate is as much about trajectory as it is about this single law.
Public opinion has shifted significantly over recent decades, moving from a majority viewing assisted suicide as morally wrong to a plurality or majority seeing it as acceptable under certain terms. Attitudes spiked after 2013 and have hovered in a range that reflects differences in wording and context—people respond differently to terms like “physician-assisted suicide,” “doctor-assisted death,” or “euthanasia.” That fluidity matters because legislation and polling feed each other: laws can normalize options, and changing views can make new laws politically possible.
What The AMA Says About Physician-Assisted Suicide
Medical societies have struggled to pin down a unified response, and the American Medical Association frames the issue in terms of professional duty and conscience. The AMA still states in their Code of Medical Ethics that a doctor “…should not abandon a patient once it is determined that a cure is impossible, must respect patient autonomy, must provide good communication and emotional support,