Many of our New York legislators want to pass a law to make Physician Assisted Suicide (PAS) legal in our state. They have named this bill “Medical Aid in Dying,” and it is modeled after Oregon’s law passed in 1997. One of the best ways to evaluate if we want Physician Assisted Suicide legalized in New York is to look at the data from Oregon. Are these the results we want New York’s Health Department collecting in a few years? According to the Oregon Health Authority (OHA)’s Death with Dignity Act 2023 Data Summary:

• 560 patients received lethal medication prescriptions from physicians/337 people ingested the meds; an additional 30 died from meds they had received in a previous year.
• Only 3 patients were referred to psychiatric counseling before being prescribed lethal drugs. Depression, and mental illness were not evaluated in almost all the patients.
• Oregon does not have a residency requirement and there is no way of knowing if people from other states ingested the medications.
• Ingestion status is not known for 141 patients (25%).
• 17 patients didn’t take their meds and outlived prognosis.
• Since 1997, 4,274 people received prescriptions and 2,847 (67%) have died from ingesting the medication; that leaves 1427 prescriptions of lethal drugs unaccounted for.
• The OHA has no data on what happened to unused lethal medication. No reports or oversight is required in the law.
• Proponents claim that the law is to serve patients in pain; however, the 2023 Report, as in the previous years, show that pain is not even in the top five reasons that patients choose Physician Assisted Suicide.

As Catholics, we must recognize that assisting people to kill themselves is never okay. There is an important difference between giving terminally ill patients medication to soothe their pain and giving them lethal doses of meds for the purpose of suicide. Jesus’ teaching and the Catholic tradition has always been to accompany the suffering to the end of their natural life. Only God knows when each of us is finished serving Him here. We cannot make that decision. But even on a secular level, setting moral issues aside, it is dangerous to NY State to enact a law that models one that is so seriously flawed.

I have been fighting this law for almost ten years since my husband died from a long terminal illness. Help me, in one or both of these ways, to make sure that our future does not look like last year in Oregon:

• I will be attending a demonstration at the Capitol in Albany on Wednesday, May 29^th. We will be carpooling. Join us. Email me at [email protected]
• Call your legislators and tell them you do not want them to vote for the Medical Aid in Dying Act. Important ones to call are:

Peter Harckham, Senator for our district 518-455-2340

Matt Slater, Assemblyman for our district 518-455-5783

Andrea Stuart-Cousins, Senate President 518-455-2585

Carl E. Heasties, Assembly Speaker 518-455-3791