Comforting fictions about assisted suicide

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is set to sign a bill legalizing doctor-assisted suicide for terminally ill residents, making New York the 14th state to sanction so-called “death with dignity.” But the bill’s opponents didn’t go down without a fight, as it passed 81-67 in the Assembly last spring, followed by an even thinner margin of victory in the Senate. Votes split mostly along party lines, although some Democrats surprisingly crossed the aisle to lock arms with pro-life Republicans.

However, Hochul sadly speaks the truth when she says she is bowing to the majority will of New York’s populace, almost 75 percent to be precise. Another poll even showed approval from 65 percent of the state’s Catholics, although Cardinal Dolan and the state’s Catholic bishops released a joint opposition statement, asserting, “We need more access to [palliative] care, not a fast track to death in the absence of it.”

Hochul invoked her own Catholic background in an op-ed for Times Union. “I was taught that God is merciful and compassionate,” she writes, “and so must we be.” She follows the precedent set by Jerry Brown, another Catholic-educated governor who passed California’s similar bill in 2016. In Hochul’s mind, God’s ethics conveniently align with her interpretation of “liberal values” as a blank check to bodily autonomy. She celebrates the bill as a gesture in the spirit of our country’s founding, though whether the Founding Fathers would have approved is debatable, to say the least.

But, she stresses, this is not about “shortening life,” only “shortening dying.” Various “guardrails” are intended to keep the bill’s scope narrow, including a doctor’s confirmation that the patient has fewer than 6 months to live, a psychological confirmation that the patient is choosing freely under no duress (with financial beneficiaries excluded from witnessing or interpreting the request), and a mandatory 5-day waiting period. 

Of course, we’ve seen this movie before, both in North America and in Europe. Last year, I wrote about Emmanuel Macron’s similar choice to proceed with a bill in France that is similarly supposed to have “guardrails.” But French activists will naturally continue pushing for more concessions, as New York activists doubtless will too. Wesley Smith predicts the same for Illinois, which also legalized assisted death last year. Clauses initially included as protections “will quickly be redefined as ‘obstacles’ to a good death and the inevitable process of legal loosening will commence.” 

This is of course inevitable once the state blesses suicide as a possible good, however qualified. We as a society can say, “Suicide is never the answer,” but those words will increasingly ring hollow next to policy that says, “Suicide can be the answer, sometimes.” The consistent moral way to resolve this tension is never to start down the dark path of state-sanctioned suicide to begin with. The consistent immoral way is the way of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Canada. 

Hochul also chooses not to see that “pressure” can take many forms. In Iceland, no one is forcing women to abort children with Down Syndrome, but the practice is so normalized that those who don’t feel socially isolated. Normalizing an “early” death for the terminally ill will create a similar kind of ambient social pressure that can’t be captured in a crude word like “duress.” Santiago Ramos notes that it also gives health insurance companies a perverse financial incentive to boost the option. He further observes that New York is one of the most expensive places to die slowly, with high price tags for palliative care and assisted living. The brutal truth is that death is cheaper.

In Hochul’s mind, she is signing a quintessentially hands-off policy. This is a comforting fiction, just as it’s a comforting fiction that abortion policy is merely a pledge to keep “hands off” a woman’s body. In reality, it takes a village to kill an unborn child, or a dying man.

It could be argued, as some writers like Tom Holland have attempted to do, that such debates are really a “Christian civil war” between those making pro-life arguments and those taking God’s name in vain, like Hochul has here. But it takes no time for choice to devour itself—for “We should allow the terminally ill to kill themselves, it’s so much more compassionate and respectful of their autonomy” to morph into “The terminally ill really ought to kill themselves, it’s so much easier for the rest of us.” The writer Richard Hanania helpfully illustrates this move in his own work, insisting that he’s concerned for the sick person’s own well-being while simultaneously saying such people have a duty to hasten their exit stage left—you know, for the common good.

By co-opting religious language, Hochul is less honest than those secular humanists who openly attack Christianity as an obstacle to their goals on life issues. They have at least clearly understood what Christianity is actually about. The same cannot be said for Gov. Hochul. She can set New York on the path to misery if she is determined to do so, but she should leave God out of it.