New York’s new assisted-suicide law is set to take effect, but several Catholic religious orders and health care ministries have secured temporary protection from provisions they argued would force them to participate in conduct directly contrary to their faith.
The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty announced last week that four orders of Catholic nuns and several Catholic ministries will not be required to assist patients seeking physician-assisted suicide while their federal lawsuit against New York proceeds.
The plaintiffs include the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm, Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict, Little Sisters of the Poor, and the Diocese of Rockville Centre.
The dispute comes as New York implements its Medical Aid in Dying Act, signed by Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul in December. The law makes medical aid in dying available to terminally ill New Yorkers who have less than six months to live.
For the Catholic organizations involved in the lawsuit, however, participation presents a fundamental religious conflict. Their ministries are built around caring for the sick and dying while adhering to Catholic teaching that deliberately ending innocent human life is morally impermissible.
On July 31, Becket announced that, with New York State’s agreement, a federal judge had ordered the state not to enforce the disputed assisted-suicide requirements against the Catholic plaintiffs while litigation continues.
The result is temporary rather than a final judgment on the underlying lawsuit. But it means the religious organizations can continue operating without being compelled to participate in assisted suicide while the court considers their claims.
“This agreement is an important first step towards protecting religious freedom,” Bishop John Barres of the Diocese of Rockville Centre said.
“New York cannot force the Church to answer suffering with suicide or abandon the sick and dying when they need care most,” Barres continued. “Until our legal fight is resolved, this temporary agreement keeps our ministries free to serve every patient according to the Gospel.”
Arielle Del Turco, director of the Center for Religious Liberty at Family Research Council, likewise welcomed the development while condemning the underlying law.
“No health care worker should feel they must violate their conscience or lose their job,” Del Turco told The Washington Stand. “And no faith-based health care institutions should fear being sued for not providing services that they believe are evil.”
The controversy involves two separate questions that are increasingly colliding as assisted-suicide laws expand: whether states should permit terminally ill patients to seek medical assistance in dying, and whether religious doctors, nurses and institutions can be required to participate.
The Supreme Court addressed part of the constitutional landscape nearly three decades ago. In its 1997 decision in Washington v. Glucksberg, the Court held that the Due Process Clause does not provide a constitutional right to assistance in committing suicide. The decision did not prevent individual states from enacting their own laws allowing the practice.
Since then, medical aid in dying has been authorized in a growing number of jurisdictions. It is now authorized in 13 states and Washington, D.C., for qualifying terminally ill patients.
The conscience question has developed alongside that expansion.
During President Donald Trump’s first administration, a 2019 federal rule sought to strengthen protections for medical professionals who refused certain procedures or services because of religious or moral objections, including assisted suicide.
New York’s current legal battle puts that conflict directly before the courts: A state has legalized a medical practice while religious institutions maintain that facilitating it would violate beliefs governing the very purpose of their ministries.
Supporters of the New York law describe the issue differently.
“This law is about compassion, family, love, and respect for bodily autonomy,” Corinne Carey, senior campaign director for Compassion & Choices NY/NJ, said.
Catholic teaching begins from a different premise. Human life, including life approaching its natural end, is not regarded as something whose value depends upon health, independence or the absence of suffering. Consequently, the Catholic ministries involved in the lawsuit view caring for terminally ill patients and intentionally helping them die as morally distinct acts.
That conviction also explains why the case carries significance beyond an ordinary disagreement over health care regulation. The plaintiffs are not merely asking to refrain from offering one service among many. They contend that the state cannot require religious ministries devoted to caring for the dying to assist in deliberately ending those patients’ lives.
Their argument draws directly from their understanding of Scripture.
Job 14:5-6 declares, “Since his days are determined, and the number of his months is with you, and you have appointed his limits that he cannot pass, look away from him and leave him alone, that he may enjoy, like a hired hand, his day.”
For Christians holding that view, suffering does not grant human beings ultimate authority over the beginning or end of life. Nor is death understood simply as a medical escape from physical pain.
Romans 8 instead places present suffering within the Christian promise of redemption: “For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us.”
That theological divide cannot be eliminated by changing terminology from “assisted suicide” to “medical aid in dying.” Supporters and opponents are working from fundamentally different understandings of autonomy, suffering, death and the obligations of medicine.
New York has chosen to permit qualifying terminally ill residents to seek assistance in ending their lives. These Catholic nuns and ministries have chosen to continue caring for those patients without participating in that decision.
For now, the federal court order means the state cannot force them to choose between their ministries and their faith while the lawsuit moves forward.
