The New York State Assembly this week passed a controversial “Medical Aid in Dying Act” that would allow mentally competent adults with less than six months to live the option of taking a lethal cocktail of drugs.
The bill passed comfortably, 81-67, even “with more than 10 Democrats joining the minority Republicans in voting no,” according to Gothamist.
A similar measure died not-so-quietly in the New York State Senate last year. The New York Post reported Tuesday that State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins “acknowledged that the proposal has gained traction over the last few years and that she would discuss it with members.” She did not, however, tell the paper whether she would bring the Assembly bill up for a vote in the Senate.
Another unknown is whether Gov. Kathy Hochul, another Democrat, would sign the bill.
It was just earlier today that I reminded readers that every day, Democrat politicians must ask themselves the exact same question: “What is the stupidest possible thing a person could do to harm themselves or society at large, and how can my party make it easier or even incentivize them to do it? I mean, in ways we haven’t already done a thousand times.”
I’m not here to pass judgment on people who are unable to bear their sickness or pain any longer, or to interfere with the whispered discussions that sometimes go on between a family and a doctor about the terminally ill. That’s between them, their consciences, and their God.
But the government has zero business getting involved. None.
“There are slippery slopes,” I once wrote of Canada’s rapidly expanding MAID services, “and then there are elevator shafts going straight down to immediate doom.”
Canada’s MAID law came into effect in 2021 and, just like the bill just passed by the New York state assembly, restricted “access” to suicide to people who were both mentally competent and terminally ill. Just two years later, Canada’s Liberals had expanded MAID to cover almost anything.
“Stage Four lung cancer?” I asked two years ago. “MAID. Permanently disabled and unable to care for yourself? MAID. Chronic pain? MAID. Down in the dumps? MAID. Are you one of those icky poor people? MAID.”
That report involved Vancouver resident Kathrin Mentler, who was recommended to accept state-sponsored suicide because there weren’t any psychiatrists available to treat her chronic depression.
Mentler tried to check herself into a Vancouver hospital in June of 2023 to get help with “debilitating feelings of hopelessness and suicidality. What she received instead was a notice from a clinician that Canada’s broken healthcare system had created a shortage of psychiatrists.
“Have you considered MAID?” the clinician asked.
She wanted treatment. They offered her death.
Make no mistake, that is the slippery slope that states like California, Colorado, and eight others are on, now that they’ve approved MAID or systems like it. The government spends too much money on healthcare not to eventually want — or even someday demand — a say in who gets to live and who ought to die.
State-sponsored euthanasia was part of the Progressive platform when the movement began in this country more than a century ago. But, like every bad idea, the Left just can’t let it die naturally.
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