The moral sleight of hand

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Good morning, this is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Governor Kathy Hochul is delivering New York’s State of the State address this afternoon in which she will lay out her key priorities. One of those is to legalize doctor-assisted suicide and make New York the 13th U.S. state, along with the District of Columbia, to allow it.

EICHER: Defending that move, the governor has taken her case beyond policy alone. WORLD Opinions commentator Bethel McGrew explains what she leaves out.

BETHEL MCGREW: Governor Hochul is preparing to sign legislation legalizing doctor assisted suicide for terminally ill patients. In explaining her decision, Hochul has repeatedly framed the issue in terms of compassion, autonomy, and conscience, even invoking her own faith.

KATHY HOCHUL: I was raised in a strong Catholic family, and for many this is a moral decision, a moral judgment. And there are members of the faith community who will not accept or understand this decision I’ve made on behalf of not myself, but 20 million New Yorkers. But I can’t stand here, even as a Catholic, and say, "I can’t allow someone else to do something that I perhaps would not do." I cannot stand in their way.

That framing sounds restrained, humble even. The governor presents herself as stepping aside, letting individuals make deeply personal choices for themselves. But that posture depends on a comforting fiction; that a policy like this is merely hands off. Hochul insists it’s not about ending life, only easing suffering.

HOCHUL: I realize we’re not talking about ending life early or about dying early. And people can transition surrounded by family, loved ones, not in a hospital bed with strangers at a time when they just slip away after grueling pain.

But once the state blesses suicide as a possible good, even under limited conditions, that distinction cannot hold. We may continue to say suicide is never the answer, but our public policy will say sometimes it is. To reassure her critics, the governor emphasizes the safeguards she negotiated into the bill.

HOCHUL: Those are some of the constraints I put around this. They’re not impossible, but they give me the confidence to know that those voices that were so concerned about this, that I’ve addressed them.

Of course, we have seen this movie before. In every jurisdiction where assisted suicide is legalized, guardrails that begin as protections are eventually redefined as obstacles. Activists press. Courts reinterpret. Restrictions loosen. And not all pressure is forcible. It can be ambient, cultural, unspoken; but the sick and elderly will hear the message loud and clear—especially in a system where death is cheaper than long term care. Governor Hochul frames the policy as a matter of personal autonomy.

HOCHUL: No one has to do this. It's a choice.

But ending a life is never a solitary act. It requires doctors, pharmacists, regulators, and ultimately, the state itself. This is authorization disguised as neutrality, and that brings us back to the governor's central moral claim.

HOCHUL: If a New Yorker chooses to have that under the circumstances we predesignated, then who am I to stand in their way?

But the question is not who she is. The question is what the state becomes once it decides that helping someone die is a public good. And what it becomes once it borrows religious language to absolve itself.

Governor Hochul is free to choose this path, but she should leave God out of it.

For WORLD, I'm Bethel McGrew.

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