Is a Broad Coalition Against Physician-Assisted Suicide Possible?
New York Governor Kathy Hochul is currently reviewing legislation that would legalize physician-assisted suicide in the state, following the measure’s narrow passage by both chambers of the state legislature. If the bill is signed, New York will follow several other American jurisdictions in legalizing physician-assisted suicide. Only a society that has forgotten the dignity of human life would entertain the state-sponsored suicides of its most vulnerable citizens—the sick, disabled, and elderly.
A Culture of Health and Life?
As legalized physician-assisted suicide has become closer to a possibility in New York, administrative barriers to healthcare access have been passed at the federal level. Some of those recent federal budget cuts are set to leave ten million additional Americans without health insurance by 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a budget-related act signed into law in July 2025. A number of the provisions in this legislation, particularly some of those that will make access to healthcare more difficult, went into effect upon signing. Now, physician-assisted suicide will be presented to an increasing number of American patients as a real and plausible option for medical “care.” New York’s potential sanctioning of physician-assisted suicide follows the state of Delaware’s legalization of the anti-medical practice this past May.
The medical field should champion, not reject, those most in need of healing and compassion. New York’s most vulnerable people should be able to turn to the medical field for support, but soon they may face an industry that is actively involved in their termination. The “shortcut” of eliminating the patient, however, is not a legitimate medical practice.
To oppose legalized physician-assisted suicide, however, does not require people to agree on all starting principles and premises. A broader coalition of thought may be possible, and such a union still would allow people to hold their own opinions about the value and sanctity of human life, as well as on the nature and scope of individual rights, while together opposing physician-assisted suicide. A coalition of this type could shift the cultural tides away from broader acceptance of this anti-medical practice.
The Spoiling of the Medical Field
The medical field seeks to heal, cure, promote health, and champion life. At the very least, medical practitioners must never harm their patients, and intentional killing directly contradicts this central principle. Understood rightly, medicine helps to enhance the integral whole of a human person. Further, medicine does not make distinctions between the so-called “worth” of different persons’ lives based on their perceived strength, ability, or social status. By not distinguishing between “worth” in any such way, the medical profession helps society and individuals recognize and acknowledge the intrinsic value of every human life.
However, even those who disagree with the premise that humans have inherent dignity, and that life is a gift that one must steward well, may still agree that a society that ranks individuals’ worth does so at its peril. Leaving the determination of human “worth” to an individual’s will means that one’s own biases, passions, and emotions—among other subjective influences—will define personhood, then what constitutes “full” personhood, and then the rights to which each man is (or is not) entitled.
Normative Good and Bad and “Rights”
Some disagree that suicide is morally wrong. Still others might argue that suicide is wrong, but that both suicide and the act of an assisted suicide (assisted by a second party, not a physician) should nonetheless be legal. People with both views, though, can unite in opposing physician-assisted suicide.
Specifically, one may argue from the premise that suicide, the act of self-murder, is an individual “right.” The rationale behind this claim is that if a person desires something, then it is a “good” to which one should have unfettered access. Others might claim that assistance with a suicide (not facilitated by the medical field) should not be legislatively prohibited or monitored at all. Nothing in these arguments, however, requires concluding that the medical field, one whose ultimate end is preserving life, should be complicit in ending vulnerable people’s lives.
Those with any of the above beliefs may continue to hold their own premises on the goodness or badness of suicide and the moral and legal “rights” of one to commit suicide while reaching the same conclusion. None of the prior arguments necessitates a) that society must now endorse an individual’s suicide and, most importantly, b) that medical professionals should now be permitted to assist in a patient’s self-murder.
Second, regarding appeals to unqualified individual “rights,” one must recall that physician-assisted suicide ideology claims not that one has a “right” to commit suicide, or even that one has a “right” to be assisted with his suicide, but rather, that one has a right to all four of the following: a) to commit suicide; b) to receive assistance with one’s suicide; c) to receive assistance by way of a medical practitioner in one’s suicide; d) and to receive assistance in one’s suicide by way of prescribed pharmaceutical drugs. These demands go well beyond appeals by some who might stress ideas surrounding “individual rights,” “autonomy,” or “personal choice.”
There is a host of other material involvements: the insurance company paying for the physician-assisted suicide; the local, state, and federal governments that fund and support health insurance and medicine; the taxpayers who fund medical insurance; the pharmaceutical manufacturer making the lethal drugs; the truck driver transporting the drugs; and the pharmacist dispensing those drugs, among many others. Many individuals, institutions, and companies are knowingly or unknowingly participating in this one person’s apparent “personal, individual choice,” to use classical liberal terminology, to commit self-murder. Even someone who went so far as to claim that suicide (or an assisted suicide by any second party) should be legal need not conclude that all of these interconnected persons and parts of society should sponsor, endorse, cooperate with, and facilitate the person’s assisted suicide.
Further, none of the arguments—including discussion of whether assisted suicide facilitated by any second party is a “good,” or the argument that legislation should not consider the goodness or badness of the act of suicide or the act of suicide assisted by any second party—require one to conclude that the medical field must be (or should be permitted to be) the primary cooperator.
The Medical Practitioner Is a Healer, Not a Killer
Physician-assisted suicide is not an advancement in medicine. Agreeing to help patients kill themselves rather than working to cure them is a dereliction of medical duty. Proper medicine entails suffering with the patient, in accord with the etymology of the word “compassion,” which means “to suffer with.” Medicine, understood rightly, stands with and alongside its patient until his natural death, seeking only to cure and to heal that person. The killing of the most vulnerable is a social travesty, especially for those who are subject to the so-called criteria for physician-assisted suicide and proceed to follow through with the act. These patients will die in a state of deep despair, disappearing from a callous world that encouraged them to die.
With the stakes so high, and with a view toward expanding the coalition against physician-assisted suicide, it is prudential to highlight that in order to conclude against the practice’s legalization, it is not necessary that all hold the same starting moral principles and premises. Rather, a broad coalition of people, while retaining their own principles, premises, and ideologies, can reject the legalization of physician-assisted suicide, a death of despair facilitated by a field that is meant to promote and to champion life.
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