New York Governor Kathy Hochul has announced that she intends to sign the Medical Aid in Dying Act once lawmakers return to Albany to add safeguards she requested, a move she defended in an op-ed by invoking the nation’s founding principles of limited government and individual rights. The decision has drawn sharp criticism from Republicans, religious leaders, and disability advocates who argue the policy is a moral mistake that endangers vulnerable people.
Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, outlined her support for the Medical Aid in Dying Act in an op-ed published Wednesday in the Albany Times Union, as reported by the Daily Wire. In the piece, she said she had reached an agreement with legislative leaders on additional safeguards to amend the bill, which had been passed earlier in the year by the Democratic-controlled legislature.
According to Hochul’s description in the op-ed, the forthcoming amendments are intended to better protect family members, caregivers, and physicians and to reduce the risk of coercion or misuse. Lawmakers are expected to take up those changes when they reconvene in January, after which Hochul said she plans to sign the measure.
Hochul framed her stance in terms of the country’s founding values. The Daily Wire quotes her as writing that “two and a half centuries ago, our founding fathers established a vision of a country based on limited government and broad individual rights that together protect rights of speech, worship, privacy and bodily autonomy.” She presented the act as empowering “suffering terminally ill individuals with less than six months left to live the right to medical aid to speed up the inevitable.”
She further argued, in language quoted by the Daily Wire, “I have come to see this as a matter of individual choice that does not have to be about shortening life but rather about shortening dying. And I do not believe that in every instance condemning someone to excruciating pain and suffering preserves the dignity and sanctity of life.”
Opposition to Hochul’s announcement has been swift. The New York State Republican Party called her decision a “profound moral failure,” the Daily Wire reports. Party chair Ed Cox said, “At a moment when New Yorkers are struggling with isolation and mental health crises, she is choosing to tell the most vulnerable among us that their lives are expendable. This is not compassion, it’s abandonment. True leadership defends life, dignity and hope, even when it’s hard.” Cox also used the moment to promote Republican Representative Elise Stefanik as a defender of vulnerable people.
Catholic leaders in the state issued a joint statement denouncing Hochul’s commitment to sign the bill. The Daily Wire cites the bishops as saying they are “extraordinarily troubled by Governor Hochul’s announcement that she will sign the egregious bill,” warning that “this new law signals our government’s abandonment of its most vulnerable citizens, telling people who are sick or disabled that suicide in their case is not only acceptable, but is encouraged by our elected leaders.”
The New York Alliance Against Assisted Suicide, a coalition that includes groups such as the Center for Disability Rights, Democrats for Life of New York, and New York Families Action, also criticized the legislation despite the promised revisions. According to the Daily Wire, the alliance argued that the bill would “single out disabled and terminally ill New Yorkers for radically different treatment than other individuals experiencing suicidal ideation,” would turn physicians into “facilitators of suicide,” and would require “false reporting on death certificates.”
If the law takes effect, New York would join a growing number of U.S. jurisdictions that allow some form of physician-assisted death. The Daily Wire article notes that other states and Washington, D.C., already permit medical aid in dying, though counts of exactly how many jurisdictions have such laws in force vary somewhat among outlets and can change as new measures are adopted. Separate reporting from other national and regional news organizations indicates that, before New York’s move, at least 10 states plus the District of Columbia had authorized medical aid in dying through legislation, ballot measures, or court rulings. Because laws and implementation dates differ by state, the precise ranking of where New York falls in sequence is subject to how those jurisdictions are counted.
The original article also stated that Illinois had enacted a similar law earlier in the month, with Governor J.B. Pritzker signing a bill delivered on Halloween. That claim does not appear in the Daily Wire report and is not supported by recent coverage from major national or Illinois-based news outlets; those sources indicate that while medical aid in dying has been debated in Illinois, such legislation has not been enacted there at this time. Accordingly, that assertion has been removed from this version of the article.
