Assisted Suicide Becomes Legal in New York This Week. The First Fight Was Over the Nuns.

Start with what the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne actually do. They run a 42 bed home in New York where the dying poor are cared for without charge until natural death. It is the kind of ministry that exists because someone believes every hour of a human life is worth attending.

On Wednesday, August 5, New York's Medical Aid in Dying Act takes effect. It authorizes terminally ill New Yorkers with less than six months to live to obtain lethal drugs. Governor Kathy Hochul, herself a Catholic, signed it in February and said she had secured guardrails. The state's bishops disagreed about what, exactly, those guardrails guard.

Here is the part most coverage buried. The law does not merely permit assisted suicide for those who seek it. As the sisters read it, it would pull their own ministries into the machinery: requiring the very women who built their lives around faithful care for the dying to counsel patients toward, or facilitate access to, the means of suicide.

So on July 17, four orders of nuns, the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, the Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict, and the Little Sisters of the Poor, together with Bishop John Barres and the Diocese of Rockville Centre, sued the state of New York. On July 30, six days before the law's start date, a federal judge gave them an answer.