Will New York be the next state to legalize euthanasia?
In April 2025, the New York state assembly passed a bill to allow medical aid in dying (MAID). If the state senate follows suit and the governor signs it into law, New York will join the ten American states and ten countries that permit it already.
New York's bill comes with strict regulations. The person seeking MAID has to be an adult diagnosed with a terminal illness that gives them six months or less to live. Two separate doctors have to agree that the person is competent, and they have to make the request twice, orally and in writing.
If the bill passes, it will be the triumph of a campaign that its supporters have been fighting for almost ten years. The reason it's taken so long is that, despite polls indicating majority voter support, MAID has faced fierce opposition from special interests. You can probably guess who they are.
Who owns your life?
Religious institutions, particularly the Roman Catholic church, argue that assisted dying shouldn't be allowed because our lives don't belong to us, they belong to God (by which they mean the humans who run these religious institutions). These power-hungry clergy arrogate to themselves the right to decide how long we should live and under what conditions.
This view was taken to a grotesque extreme by Catholic figures like Mother Teresa, who believed that people dying slowly in terrible pain was a good thing, because suffering is a blessing from God. She wasn't shy about saying so, including to people who were dying themselves. In a public address, she related one terminal patient's reply without realizing it was a clapback:
One day I met a lady who was dying of cancer in a most terrible condition. And I told her, I say, "You know, this terrible pain is only the kiss of Jesus—a sign that you have come so close to Jesus on the cross that he can kiss you." And she joined her hands together and said, "Mother Teresa, please tell Jesus to stop kissing me."
Religious believers, of course, are free to live their own lives by whatever principles they wish. If their faith tells them it's a sin to receive aid in dying, they don't have to pursue it. They can endure as much suffering as they're capable of. They also don't have to use contraception, drink alcohol, or eat meat if they don't want to. But in a diverse and secular society, they have no right to impose that choice on others who have different beliefs.
However, there's another criticism that's not so easy to dismiss. Disability advocates say that allowing euthanasia devalues the lives of the most downtrodden. They argue that the poor, the disabled, and the elderly will be pressured to die so as not to be a burden on society. They fear there's a slippery slope from euthanasia being permitted to its being mandated, or at least offered to the exclusion of other alternatives.
This fear isn't frivolous. In a capitalist society that values people primarily for their ability to earn and consume, it's not wrong to predict that some people will perceive others—or themselves—to be better off dead if they're too ill to contribute to the economy. There have been several troubling cases in Canada, whose law has fewer safeguards than the New York version. Despite these safeguards, you can be sure that for-profit insurance companies are already strategizing about how they could use MAID to save money by getting expensively ill people to end their lives.
The freedom not to use our freedoms
At the same time, there's a fundamental question of autonomy to consider. Do we own ourselves or not?
If we have a freedom, we can choose how to exercise it. That choice necessarily includes the right not to exercise it. Freedom of speech implies the freedom to remain silent. Freedom of religion implies the freedom to be an atheist.
Just the same way, freedom to choose what we do with our lives implies the freedom to stop living. It's the ultimate declaration of self-ownership and autonomy.
No one other than me can tell me what my purpose is, what brings me joy, or what makes my life worth living. If I decide—with a clear mind and heart—that I no longer wish to continue, shouldn't I have the right to make that choice? Is it fair or just to deny all people their liberty because it might be misused or abused in some cases?
An ideal example is the 2009 deaths of Edward and Joan Downes. Edward was a famed conductor; Joan, a ballet dancer and choreographer. Edward was growing more disabled, and Joan had been his assistant and companion, but she was suffering from cancer and had only weeks to live. In the twilight of their lives, after fifty years of marriage, they chose to die together, hand in hand, so that neither would ever have to be alone:
He spent his life conducting world-renowned orchestras, but was almost blind and growing deaf – the music he loved increasingly out of reach. His wife of 54 years had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. So Edward and Joan Downes decided to die together.
... "After 54 happy years together, they decided to end their own lives rather than continue to struggle with serious health problems," said a statement from the couple's son and daughter, Caractacus and Boudicca.
"They wanted to be next to each other when they died," Caractacus Downes told London's Evening Standard newspaper. "They held hands across the beds."
If there's such a thing as a good way to die, this is it. The rest of us can only hope that our passage from this life will be as peaceful, full of love, and yes, beautiful as this.
Even if you think stories like these are rare, forcing people to remain alive isn't necessarily the compassionate or moral option. The life-at-any-cost mindset has produced a litany of medical horrors: rib-cracking CPR, ventilators that require the patient to be kept sedated and paralyzed, feeding tubes surgically implanted through a hole in the abdomen, and more.
These torturous treatments can keep a person alive after any hope of recovery has passed. But is that the quality of life we should want for ourselves? What good is merely biological existence if a person is permanently unconscious, in debilitating pain, or drugged into a stupor? What good is it if their heart beats and their lungs inflate, but dignity, awareness and identity have slipped away?
We have no qualms about granting animals a merciful death when there's nothing in their future but pain. There's no reason that basic logic of compassion shouldn't be applied to human beings. The experts agree as well: doctors who administer life-prolonging treatments overwhelmingly don't want them for themselves.
If MAID passes, in New York and elsewhere, we can look forward to a future where dying is less protracted, less painful, and less medicalized. Instead of spending their last days in a hospital bed under harsh white lights, more people will choose to die at home, in comfort. Instead of suffering, people will be able to take a pill and slip away as gently as falling asleep at the end of a long and weary day. We'll still be able to live life to the fullest, but when it becomes more of a burden than a blessing, we'll be able to depart this world on our own terms.
