Since a deal was reached with state legislators last Wednesday, Governor Kathy Hochul (D-New York) plans to sign a bill next year.
But after hearing from New Yorkers on opposite sides of assisted suicide, Hochul, a Catholic, wants to add "guardrails" to the bill.
"I was taught that God is merciful and compassionate, and so must we be," she wrote in an Albany Times Union op-ed. "This includes permitting a merciful option to those facing the unimaginable and searching for comfort in their final months in this life."
The Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD) act requires that a terminally ill person in New York with six months to live make a written request for life-ending drugs. Two witnesses must sign off on the request, which would then have to be approved by the person's attending physician as well as a consulting physician.
This is all to ensure that a patient is not being coerced.
Hochul's guardrails include confirmation that the person truly has six months or less to live and that the patient is capable of making the decision. The governor has also called for and received language calling for mandatory five-day waiting period.
Outpatient facilities associated with religious hospitals may elect not to offer the option.
Still, Jake Hudson, deputy coalitions director for the Patients' Rights Action Fund, says his organization deeply opposes Gov. Hochul's decision to sign this legislation.
"The safeguards that she is adding to the bill do not work, and they have been proven to not work in other states that have already legalized assisted suicide legislation," he tells AFN.
12 other states and the District of Columbia have laws allowing for medically assisted suicide. Illinois joined the list earlier this month when Governor JB Pritzker (D) signed a bill into law.
The Patients' Rights Action Fund, however, says such laws violate the Americans With Disabilities Act. Hudson notes that similar MAiD laws are being challenged in federal court in California, Colorado, and Delaware.
He thinks the best thing that people can do to combat this type of legislation is to speak out and be vocal.
"Contact your legislators; contact your governor," he urges. "It is important to make your voice heard, especially on this issue."
A warning from the north
Pastor Artur Pawlowski has a personal warning for Americans who view socialized medicine as a model of what they want to bring to the U.S.
He says it cost his mother, Grace, her life during the height of the COVID pandemic, which Canada leveraged to the hilt for its authoritarian tendencies. She was on dialysis and waiting for a kidney transplant, but she was removed from that list because she was unvaccinated.
Pawlowski says his mother's health naturally declined until she was taken to a hospital where little was done to save her life.
"She had seven doctors … telling her that there is nothing they can do, that she's going to die anyway; it would be better for her to end it now," he remembers.
Grace eventually died without so-called medical assistance in dying.
Meanwhile, Pastor Pawlowski says his country is struggling because Canada's few doctors are doing the opposite of what they are supposed to do.
"Instead of fighting for people's lives, instead of healing people that are broken, they are just literally murdering them like Doctor Mengele during the Nazi era," he laments.
Notorious SS physician Josef Mengele, nicknamed the "angel of death," used Nazi racial theory to justify a wide spectrum of inhumane, and often deadly, medical experiments on prisoners at Auschwitz during World War II, especially twins, children, and people with disabilities. He is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people, possibly tens of thousands.
Last year alone, 16,499 Canadians died via medical assistance in dying. Pawlowski asserts socialized medicine – especially in a country that has already left its biblical moorings – will always lean toward death.
"My warning to the American people would be very simple: Look what is happening at our nation to your north, and don't do the same thing – or else."
