by Rabbi Yair Hoffman
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Governor Kathy Hochul holds a life-and-death decision in her hands. Within days, she will decide whether to sign a bill that would make New York the latest state to legalize assisted suicide—a law that Jewish organizations and religious leaders warn could become a death sentence for the very people it pretends to protect.
The bill is called the “Medical Aid in Dying” act. The name itself is a masterpiece of political dishonesty. “Aid” suggests help. “Dying” suggests something inevitable. But strip away the euphemisms and you find the truth: this is a law that would put poison in the hands of vulnerable people, with almost no way to take it back, and call the killing “medicine.”
What Would This Law Actually Do?
If signed, this bill would allow doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to patients diagnosed as terminally ill. The patient would then take the drugs themselves to end their life.
Supporters speak of dignity and choice. But dignity for whom? Choice under what circumstances? The answers reveal a system designed with extraordinary carelessness—or perhaps extraordinary cynicism—about whose lives might be lost along the way.
A Meeting That Said Everything by Saying Nothing
On Wednesday, Jewish community leaders met with Governor Hochul’s staff, hoping for clarity. They received something more revealing: evasion.
The Governor’s representatives—Patrick Kwan of Legislative Affairs and Eva Wyner, Director of Jewish Affairs—laid out three possibilities with the enthusiasm of bureaucrats reading from a script. Hochul might veto the bill entirely. She might sign it exactly as written. Or she might sign it while promising to add safety measures later through a “chapter amendment.”
Yonasan Teleky, an activist who attended the meeting, described the officials’ demeanor as “non-committal and non-inquiring.” They weren’t there to listen. They were there to manage.
That third option—the chapter amendment—should terrify anyone paying attention. Under this approach, the original bill becomes law immediately. The promised fixes arrive later. Maybe. If they work. Which they won’t.
“Without the exact text of the governor’s changes, it’s impossible to know what loopholes she left in,” Teleky warned.
One activist who has fought this legislation for over a decade noted the dark irony of the amendment discussion itself: “The fact that Gov. Hochul allegedly considered these amendments suggests that she is at least partially cognizant of the deeply flawed nature of any such legislation.”
In other words: the Governor apparently knows this bill is dangerous. She’s considering signing it anyway.
The Holes That Cannot Be Patched
Critics have identified what they call “gaping holes” in the legislation—not minor oversights, but fundamental design failures that no amendment can repair.
Once the poison is dispensed, it stays dispensed. Even if a patient’s mental state collapses, even if the original doctors now believe the patient has lost the capacity to make rational decisions, there is no process—none—to retrieve the lethal drugs already sitting in that patient’s medicine cabinet. The system assumes that a person approved for death today will still want death tomorrow. It has no mechanism to reconsider.
Depression doesn’t count as a problem. The bill’s definition of “decision-making capacity” conveniently excludes depression and other mental illnesses. Read that again. A person in the grip of clinical depression—a condition whose very nature distorts one’s will to live—can be handed lethal drugs and told this is healthcare. The psychiatric “safeguard” doesn’t cover the one thing it most needs to cover.
The people who know the patient best are silenced. A psychiatrist who has treated a patient for twenty years has no formal standing to object if some new evaluator—someone who met the patient for perhaps an hour—signs off on assisted suicide. Neither does the patient’s family. The system is designed to approve death, not to question it.
Fraud is apparently not a concern. A bill that ends lives contains no specific measures against fraud. None. Meanwhile, the pharmacist who physically hands over the lethal drugs faces zero oversight requirements. The law doesn’t even require a phone call to the prescribing doctor. The final link in the chain of death operates on the honor system.
Technology won’t save anyone. Some have proposed requiring video recordings of patients requesting assisted suicide, as if a camera could capture coercion happening in another room, or fear that never reaches a patient’s face, or pressure applied over months. And in 2025, with artificial intelligence producing video forgeries that fool the human eye, the suggestion is not just inadequate—it’s almost quaint.
The Impossible Promise
Here is what opponents want Governor Hochul—and everyone else—to understand: Even if you accept the bill’s own logic, even if you believe that people who want to die should be helped to die, this legislation cannot be fixed.
The supporters of assisted suicide claim to champion autonomy—the right of individuals to choose their own fate. But one leading advocate against the bill put his finger on the lethal contradiction: “This bill perpetrates the ultimate subversion of autonomy—the autonomy over the choice to remain alive—in the very name of autonomy itself.”
A bill that cannot guarantee it won’t kill people who want to live is not a bill about choice. It is a bill about acceptable losses. And the “acceptable losses” will be the elderly, the disabled, the depressed, the poor, the lonely—everyone without the power to fight back.
The Corruption of Medicine
Beyond the mechanical failures lies something deeper: this bill corrupts the meaning of medicine itself.
“Medicine always means a drug that lessens the disease or symptoms,” Teleky explained. “This bill calls the poison ‘medicine’—warping not only the role of the doctor but also the drugs they prescribe.”
For thousands of years, physicians have operated under a simple principle: heal the sick, comfort the dying, never hasten death. This bill asks doctors to become something else entirely. It asks them to dispense death and call it care.
Rabbis Shlomo Brody and Dr. Aaron Glatt, himself a physician, wrote directly to Governor Hochul with words that should give any thinking person pause: “Physician-assisted suicide is a distortion of this great calling. Healthcare professionals did not enter this great field for the sake of actively helping people die.”
A Community Speaks With One Voice
Across the Jewish organizational world—groups that often disagree on everything else—opposition to this bill has been unanimous.
Agudath Israel of America warned that “financial pressures can lead patients to make irreversible decisions.” When a course of treatment costs hundreds of thousands of dollars and a lethal prescription costs a few hundred, the economics speak for themselves. Insurance companies are not known for their sentimentality.
The Orthodox Union called the bill “a moral and practical failure” that violates the sanctity of human life.
The Rabbinical Alliance of America declared that “no individual, physician, or legislative body has the moral right to intentionally end a human life,” warning that New York risks “redefining medicine in ways that fundamentally contradict its healing mission.”
The Vaad HaRabbonim of Queens urged opposition before the bill even passed the State Senate.
These organizations understand something that the bill’s supporters refuse to acknowledge: once you make death a medical option, you change the calculation for everyone.
The Prophecy Already Coming True
Decades ago, Rabbi Aaron D. Twerski saw where this road would lead. “Today, it’s a free choice issue,” he warned. “Tomorrow, Blue Cross will refuse to pay for it… and hospitals will refuse to provide the beds.”
The “right to die” has a way of becoming the “duty to die.” What begins as an option becomes an expectation. What begins as compassion becomes pressure. And the pressure falls hardest on those who already feel they are burdens—even when they are not, even when their lives have meaning they cannot see, even when recovery or peace might be days or weeks away.
A Life That Almost Wasn’t Allowed
Rabbi Benzion Lesser of Chayim Aruchim recently shared a story that should haunt everyone involved in this debate.
A non-observant Jewish woman lay in a hospital. Her family wanted to remove her from life support. An observant Jewish doctor initially refused to intervene to save her, citing halachic misconceptions about her condition. Only after extensive persuasion did the medical team agree to continue treatment.
That woman recovered. She lived. She eventually thanked visitors for the “miracle” of her survival.
Under a law that normalizes death as a treatment option, who would have fought for her? Under a system that makes killing convenient, would anyone have bothered to try?
What You Must Do Now
Governor Hochul has days—perhaps only days—to make her decision. The pressure from assisted suicide advocates is intense. The pressure from those who value life must be greater.
Contact Governor Hochul immediately and urge her to VETO bill A136/S138 outright—not to sign it with amendments, not to “fix” it later, but to veto it completely.
Here is the crucial point to make: Even accepting the stated position of the bill’s own supporters—that people who wish to die should be allowed assistance in dying—it is practically impossible to construct any version of this legislation that guarantees protection for people who do not truly wish to die. The bill cannot be fixed. It can only be stopped.
Contact the Governor:
The Honorable Governor Kathy Hochul NY State Capitol Building Albany, NY 12224
Online: https://www.governor.ny.gov/content/governor-contact-form
Phone: (518) 474-8390 (9:00 AM – 5:00 PM)
Fax: (518) 474-1513