People who have stood by and watched loved ones lose long fights against excruciating terminal illnesses want New York to join the 10 other American states that allow people to choose to end their lives with the help of a doctor. They call it medical aid in dying; opponents call it physician-assisted suicide.
We respect those who see the concept as an affront to medicine’s age-old Hippocratic oath, whereby practitioners are supposed to do no harm — and to other values that life is worth defending to the end. We also respect those who think those ideas are no excuse to let people whose days are numbered, who are in pain, whose quality of life is gone, from choosing to say goodbye on their own terms.
These are weighty matters of morality and faith and human kindness and decency. Everyone lives and everyone dies, the question is when and how. The motives of people in support of adopting such a law in New York State and those who are opposed are well-meaning and deeply held, including doctors taking opposite stands. It is important that all are heard.
While we respect deeply held beliefs on both sides of this debate, we can’t say we respect New York’s legislative process, where there’s never time to wrestle with and honestly answer genuinely complicated questions.
When legislators arrive in January they are swallowed by the budget process. This is a frenzy of deal-making, whereby legislation that’s been kicking around for years, often without being tested in hearings or other forums, gets crammed into a massive omnibus bill that nobody can scrutinize until after it passes.
That’s how New York got bail reforms that had to be amended, and amended, and amended again. It’s how congestion pricing finally became the law. It’s how mayoral control of the city schools typically gets reauthorized, and this year got changed. It’s how this year the city got power to set speed limits on its own streets, and how tenants got new protections from eviction.
Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie says the budget is for questions of dollars and cents, not for policy, but that supposed principle is violated year-in, year-out. Like it or not, the budget is the only time most big things can get done in New York.
And when that budget process is over — which this year happened a few weeks late — the Legislature typically resorts to saying things like, oops, sorry, no time to consider truly difficult questions like property tax reform or physician-assisted suicide or insert your hobbyhorse here. Because that would require serious research and debate and negotiation, all of which are in short supply in a place driven more by crass politics than by serious lawmaking, particularly in election years.
“I believe this is a robust discussion, and obviously, we’re not there yet”: That’s how Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins put it about the fact that the few remaining session days are insufficient to grapple with the complexity of helping terminally ill people die.
Assisted suicide, which has been shoved to the side year after year after year after year, is the latest proof that the Legislature is where important ideas that deserve careful study and earnest and honest consideration go to die slow, painful deaths.
