Governor Hochul announced an agreement with the Legislature to advance legislation legalizing medical aid in dying in New York, with amendments expected to be passed and signed this month. In her statement, the Governor described this law as an extension of New York’s long-standing commitment to freedom, emphasizing personal choice and the desire to “shorten not lives, but deaths.”
For many New Yorkers, this framing may sound compassionate. For people with disabilities, it is deeply concerning. STIC strongly opposes this law, as it reflects and reinforces longstanding biases that devalue human lives, especially for people with disabilities, and diverts attention away from the state’s responsibility to ensure access to the supports and services necessary for people with disabilities to live with dignity and autonomy.
Freedom is only meaningful when real choices exist. For people with disabilities those choices are already constrained by systemic failures in healthcare, long-term services and supports, mental health care, and community-based resources. When people cannot access adequate care, when families are exhausted and unsupported, when insurance denies services, and when disability itself is treated as suffering, the “choice” to die is not made freely, it is steered by neglect.
Governor Hochul points to additional “guardrails” as evidence that vulnerable populations will be protected. But safeguards cannot fix a healthcare system that already devalues Disabled lives. Observing the history of other U.S. states with long-standing medical aid in dying laws shows that over time, oversight weakens, psychiatric evaluations become cursory, and the reasons people cite for seeking assisted death shift away from pain and toward fear of being a burden.
Assisted suicide was made legal in Canada in June 2016; less than a decade later it is now Canada's fifth leading cause of death. The cultural trend towards devaluing life that comes with state-sanctioned suicide cannot be overstated. Further, these trends disproportionately affect people who rely on public insurance, people with disabilities, and people with fewer resources, when they, by definition, are at their most vulnerable.
When the state frames assisted death as compassion while failing to ensure access to care, it sends a dangerous message: that suffering caused by societal policy failure is an acceptable reason to die. Indeed, it implies that it is the preferred choice.
Governor Hochul spoke about the loss of her mother to ALS. Many Disabled people and their families share experiences of profound loss and pain, and those experiences deserve acknowledgment. But many also carry stories rarely told—of being pressured by medical professionals to withdraw care, of being told their lives lack quality, and of being offered death while fighting for the basic supports needed to live. These experiences are not hypothetical. They are systemic. They happen. And with the state endorsing the choice to die, they will happen more, and more.
True freedom for people with disabilities does not come from expediting death. It comes from living with dignity, support, autonomy, and inclusion. Until New York fully invests in accessible healthcare, home and community-based services, mental health care, and disability supports, medical aid in dying does not expand choice. It narrows it.
STIC remains deeply concerned that this law, regardless of amendments, will place people with disabilities at greater risk by normalizing death as a response to unmet needs. New York should be leading the nation in protecting life by fixing broken systems and affirming the value of living life to the fullest, not by promoting accelerated death as a substitute for adequate care and support.