After months of hemming and hawing that would have made even the original “Hamlet on the Hudson” cringe, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has announced that she intends to sign legislation legalizing medically assisted suicide in the state, after demanding a few minor amendments to the version enacted by the state legislature. The timing of the announcement is a final insult by Hochul to outgoing Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who labored long and hard to persuade the governor to the path of life and mercy. More importantly, it is a death warrant for the most vulnerable citizens under Hochul’s protection.
This is a craven cave-in to ideological activists. There is no great public groundswell among the electorate for assisted suicide. Hochul would have paid no real political price for vetoing the bill. Like the legislators who voted for this law, she is signing it because she wanted to.
Hochul justified this decision, in a tendentious Albany Times-Union op-ed, as a sign of her commitment to small government: “In the true spirit of this country, government has a responsibility to protect, not interfere, with an individual’s deeply personal decisions.” This is a laughable posture coming from a big-government Democrat who fired more than 10,000 health care workers for declining the Covid vaccine. If they killed patients instead, the governor would have their backs. In an Orwellian passage, Hochul insisted that the bill “does not have to be about shortening life but rather about shortening dying.”
Hochul insists that this law will not lead where assisted-suicide laws have led throughout the Western world: to government, medical, and family pressures to end expensive end-of-life care. The structural incentives all point in one direction, especially in states such as New York with lavish health-subsidy systems. As Wesley Smith detailed in our pages, however, the law’s “guardrails” are unlikely to do much to restrain those pressures, rather than just slowing them down a bit. If anything, requiring a doctor’s signoff only entangles the medical profession, which is supposed to do no harm, even more deeply in dealing out death. That is profoundly corrupting to the whole field of medicine.
Of course, the rightful objections to medically assisted suicide are more fundamental than debates about incentives, procedural protections, or even the size of government or the integrity of doctors. They are about human life itself. It is no accident that political support for assisted suicide travels hand in hand with the most strident support for taxpayer-funded abortion on demand. Both represent a cold-eyed, utilitarian approach to dispensing with inconvenient human beings as if they had no inherent value. We think that all men were endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights to life — and that our society should act as if we mean it.