New York's Medical Aid in Dying Act has created a horrible conundrum for several Roman Catholic religious orders and healthcare facilities. The facilities and caregivers will be unable to reconcile their strongly held religious beliefs on suicide with the state's mandates in the Medical Aid in Dying Act.
A coalition of religious organizations, including Catholic nuns as well as Catholic healthcare facilities, is suing the state on constitutional grounds, claiming the Medical Aid in Dying Act violates the organizations' constitutionally protected freedom of religion.
The new assisted suicide statute, set to take effect on Aug. 5, "allows terminally ill patients with a prognosis of six months or less to request drugs to end their lives," according to Madeline Long writing in The Free Press. “New Yorkers deserve the choice to endure less suffering, not by shortening their lives, but by shortening their deaths,” claims New York Governor Kathy Hochul.
The Medical Aid in Dying Act is supposed to work in tandem with another statute, the Palliative Care Information Act, which requires doctors and nurses to inform terminally ill patients of all their end-of-life options, even if the patient didn't request the information.
There is an opt-out provision for prescribing and administering lethal drugs on the premises of religious healthcare facilities. But there's no exemption for forcing nuns to advise terminally ill patients of their options to end their lives.
"Even facilities in New York that invoke the religious exemption must still require physicians to counsel patients about assisted dying, assess their mental fitness, and walk them through every step of the qualification process on that facility’s premises — everything short of writing the prescription and administering the drugs," writes Long.
“It imposes direct obligations on the sisters,” says an attorney at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty representing the plaintiffs, Adèle Keim. She told The Free Press: “The sisters are required to create an assisted suicide information delivery system and implement it in their home.”
Mother Marie Edward, the superior of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, said she had a duty to “support the person to the natural end of their life.”
“Everyone is made in the image and likeness of God, and there is a dignity about the human person,” Sister Marie said. “We are only the guardians of this body. We do not take the charge of whether or not we live or we die. That’s up to God.”
The lawsuit asks the court to declare the Medical Aid in Dying Act unconstitutional and block its enforcement before it takes effect next month. At its core, the complaint argues the law violates the First Amendment by compelling doctors and nurses at religious facilities to counsel patients about assisted dying and by interfering with the Church’s ability to govern its own healthcare institutions. It also states that the law conflicts with federal statutes prohibiting the use of federal healthcare funds for assisted dying—a claim that applies to several plaintiffs who receive Medicare and Medicaid funding.
Noncompliance carries significant consequences, according to the complaint, including civil penalties of up to $2,000 per violation, potential loss of operating licenses, and criminal liability resulting in up to a year in prison for willful violations.
New York’s law includes a provision permitting religious facilities to opt out of prescribing or administering lethal drugs on their premises. But according to the sisters’ lawyers, the opt-out is among the narrowest in the nation, narrower than similar laws in California, Oregon, and Washington, where religious providers can opt out of all participation if their faith requires it.
Left-wing state and federal governments are usually perplexed. "We've created these wonderfully elegant workarounds for you, religious types, including opt-outs and exemptions. How can it go against your morals just to talk about end-of-life options?"
For example, Barack Obama seemed generally confused when he fashioned “workarounds” and “fixes” to Obamacare that he believed would allow the Little Sisters of the Poor and others to offer contraceptives to employees. Third parties doing all the work would fulfill the mandate. The sisters would never have to touch any of the paperwork authorizing birth control for employees on their healthcare plan.
Is it because many on the left are used to compromising with their own moral precepts that they can rationalize away moral dilemmas by finding their own “out” to satisfy their consciences?
“New York is not increasing choice,” Keim said. “It’s extinguishing choice. It’s eliminating the ability of New Yorkers to choose for themselves and their loved ones an environment of end-of-life care where they will not be offered assisted suicide in their lowest moments, and where they will be treasured and valued and treated with dignity until their final breath.”
Rosary Hill Home, which the Dominican Sisters staff, is not a licensed nursing home facility. That means it is not eligible to opt out of the assisted suicide mandates. If the act goes into effect, Rosary Hill is going to have to require its physician, who visits once a week, to inform the 24 terminally ill patients of their end-of-life options.
It's not the first time that Rosary Hill has run afoul of New York's woke bureaucrats.
In April, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne filed a separate lawsuit against the state over a 2023 law requiring long-term care facilities to assign rooms by gender identity, use patients’ preferred pronouns, and subject all staff to mandatory “training on cultural competency” every two years.
The sisters had never heard of the law until letters from New York’s Department of Health began arriving in 2024. According to the complaint, they had received three over the course of roughly a year, each demanding compliance. They had never had a patient seeking to transition. In March 2026, they wrote to the state requesting a religious exemption and heard nothing. They filed suit the following month.
"The April complaint argues the law is unconstitutional on multiple grounds, forcing the sisters to affirm beliefs and adopt practices that contradict their Catholic faith, while simultaneously exempting facilities run by the Church of Christ, Scientist from the very same requirements," states Long.
The Supreme Court has been far more sympathetic to the religious freedom argument than some lower courts, especially when it comes to these healthcare mandates. The sisters and healthcare facilities suing to prevent the state from violating their consciences shouldn't have to put up with those who reject the idea that their fundamental beliefs even exist challenging those very beliefs.
