Against Suicide—Except Assisted Suicide? New York’s Contradiction
In February 2026, Governor Kathy Hochul signed a bill that will legalize physician-assisted suicide in New York State.1 Going into effect in August 2026, the legislation will allow physicians to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to New York State residents with active suicidal ideation and who, it is speculated, have six or less months to live.2
Paradoxically and irrationally, however, the legalization of physician-assisted suicide in New York State stands in opposition to the state’s own initiatives aiming to save lives from suicide.3
The New York Governor’s “Suicide Prevention Month”
In New York, claims by physician-assisted suicide (also to be abbreviated “PAS” in certain mentions in this essay) ideology conflict with other societal claims surrounding suicide, bemoaned in most quarters and across thought spectrums as a tragic death of despair.
Consider Governor Hochul’s proclamation dedicating September 2025 as “Suicide Prevention Awareness Month” in New York State.4 In recognition of this Suicide Prevention Month, on September 2, 16 landmarks and bridges around the state were ordered to be illuminated in purple and teal, including Manhattan’s Freedom Tower, the tallest building in the United States.5
Governor Hochul’s proclamation declared:
[S]uicide is a tragic event that affects families, friends, coworkers, and communities, leaving a lasting impact on those left behind; significant risk factors for suicide include mental health conditions, substance abuse, trauma, social isolation, and loneliness . . . 6
Hochul’s proclamation further claimed that New York State “ . . . is committed to advancing a public health approach that consistently aims to save lives and reduce the trauma impact of suicide on individuals, families, and communities . . .”7
In addition to the rhetoric surrounding anti-suicide social initiatives, New York State government also has in place a broad anti-suicide initiative under the banner of the Suicide Prevention Center of New York State (SPCNY).8 The initiative includes a 77-page document for healthcare providers on the state’s “Aim for Zero Suicides” Implementation Guide.9
Consider the following announcement, aimed toward the medical profession, located on the main webpage of the state Suicide Prevention Center:
Suicide deaths for individuals under the care of health and behavioral health systems are preventable. Find the tools and resources you need to prepare the workforce and prevent suicide within your healthcare system.10
This message from the state to healthcare providers squares with Hochul’s Suicide Prevention Month proclamation’s mention of the intended purpose of the SPCNY, stating that the initiative “promotes, coordinates, and strategically advances suicide prevention across New York State with the goal of reducing suicide attempts and deaths . . .”11
A State Considering the Facilitation of Suicides While Promoting Strong Anti-Suicide Initiatives
There is now, however, an extremity of irreconcilable logic at play in New York with impending legalized PAS in the state. For one cannot square a “Suicide Prevention Month” and a state “Suicide Prevention Center” with the active promotion, endorsement, and facilitation of suicide.
In New York, both supporters of, and assenters to, PAS legalization cannot hide behind, or obfuscate by using, “individual choice” rhetoric. For it is in-disputably the case that state government, state government’s administrative apparatus, and the state healthcare industry will all be actively, directly, and persistently involved in carrying out what is wrongly alleged to be individually-decisioned physician-assisted suicides. The healthcare industry does not consist of one person in an autonomous, isolated bubble.
Indeed, the PAS legislation will, among many other things, legalize state pharmacies to dispense legal cocktail drugs, all while the state’s medical licensing will be training healthcare practitioners in the prescribing of lethal cocktails for their patients.12 Further, the state health apparatus will be monitoring and disseminating guidelines for this new, sponsored suicide industry in New York, within both public and private healthcare facilities, all of which must, of course, satisfy state regulatory demands in order to operate legally. Hochul’s own press release details her implementation plan, stating that she pushed for an amendment “extending the effective date of the bill to six months after signing to allow the Department of Health to put into place regulations required to implement the law while also ensuring that health care facilities can properly prepare and train staff for compliance.”13 Hochul’s delayed effective date is included in the bill’s amendments.14
For the pharmaceutical industry also, both on the macro level and on down to the drugstore clerk who hands customers their prescriptions, the definition and end of “medicine” is being corrupted.
Medicines, understood rightly, cure, alleviate pain, treat, and heal. Medicine, understood rightly, does not kill. Now in New York, however, with the improper first principles that legalize suicide-by-physician, the corrupt logic gets applied subsequently. In layman’s terms, when a New York State resident goes to the pharmacist to fill a prescription, he is doing so for healing—if he has cold, he seeks to treat the cold; if he has allergies, he desires to stop the allergies. Now, as a result of the twisted logic sanctioning intentional self-murder as “medicine,” the man waiting for an allergy prescription to be filled could conceivably be standing next to a customer not waiting, say, for an antibiotic to treat an infection, but for a lethal suicide cocktail “prescription” to be filled.
In sum, government and the healthcare industry will be anything but silent observers standing at a distance while neutrally observing a person’s so-called “individual choice.”
Intentional killing is not a medical treatment, and assistance with a suicide is antithetical to the medical profession’s proper end to bring a patient to health. The mere possibility of a legal suicide-by-physician as a so-called “treatment” changes the dynamic of the healthcare-patient relationship in those circumstances in which PAS is a legal option.
Further, consider the cases of non-virtuous practitioners who might seek easy work, who seek quick money, who hold personal biases, or who have a deficiency of human compassion. How might these practitioners, when presented with a difficult, costly patient, respond now that one of the available so-called medical “choices” is simply to write a lethal prescription?
These practitioners, legally speaking, will have the positive law option to prescribe a lethal prescription, which permanently removes the patient from one’s caseload, or to provide complex, costly healthcare requiring long-term treatment and investment of time and money. Publius argued in Federalist 51 that “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.”15 Likewise, if all medical practitioners were angels, no laws, no regulation, and no oversight of the healthcare industry would be necessary. True healthcare is guided by principles of true good that orient all involved toward the true good, and in so doing, contribute toward a taming of the human passions that may not be oriented to the good of the whole person.
The Good Is Not Determined by the Passions’ Dictates
In Plato’s Gorgias, Socrates argues: “For no one who [is not] totally bereft of reason and courage is afraid to die; doing [what is] unjust is what [he is] afraid of.”16 The moral endeavor for Socrates, then, entails avoidance of the unjust action.
When it comes to the legalization of physician-assisted suicide, the focus must not, as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas would argue, be on what the passions and sentiments of any one person or a collective are dictatorially claiming at a particular moment are the seemingly pleasurable or good, as calculated by an untamed passionate part of the soul. Rather, the discernment must be in view of discovering what the good decision is, in truth, and only discoverable when the rational part of the soul properly tames the passions and then engages in its proper operation.
An appeal to autonomy, as in, this choice is good because one desires this or that object, does not prove the goodness of this or that action toward that object. Additionally, in the case of medical ethics decisions, these actions necessarily involve multiple parties, adding yet another consideration in the discovery of the justice or injustice of an act. Appeal to an autonomy principle as the sole basis for biomedical ethical decisions is implausible. For if the autonomy principle is the sole barometer of biomedical actions, then the biomedical fields must actively act, and participate in, whatever action a person desires and whenever a person desires it.
Hochul already is one of the most fervent public supporters for what she alleges is the “healthcare” consisting of the elective murder of children in the womb. Now, Hochul’s alleged “healthcare” will consist of more killing—just at a different stage of life. This perverse sanctioning of killing, meanwhile, is in total discord with the basic end of medicine.
When the media headlines end, PAS will still be lining up persons for suicides facilitated by government and wayward “medical” professionals. The regularization of PAS allows the damage to continue while the many, who do not think deeply and simply follow society’s shifting mores, go along as a result of the social legitimization of this anti-medical practice. The realities of PAS will also be glossed over so as not to alarm the many and ensure that the many are not led to truth. Indeed, the legislation explicitly instructs that death certificates of New Yorkers who commit suicide-by-physician will not indicate that the true cause of death was PAS.17 PAS, then, will even impact public health research insofar as increased death rates or increased rates of death for specific ailments cannot be accounted for adequately.
The New York governor followed passions—not reason, and not the true good. Rather than align herself with thinkers who follow truth, understood rightly, Hochul’s direction leads persons—among them, the patients and the medical establishment assisting with the killings (not to mention herself),—to a path more likely to lead to eternal nothingness than eternal beatitude.
Regardless of claims by the moment’s societal trends, ideologies, and passions, not to mention political campaigns and election cycles, physician-assisted suicide ideology faces the insurmountable dilemma that many of its premises and conclusions are faulty. Bad principles, bad premises, and bad conclusions can never become good, in truth, simply by one’s desire. Right-ness, in truth, is not impacted by any one person’s sentiments, claims, speculations, individual will, or by some human being’s ink signature on a bill printed on a piece of paper.
True Healthcare Heals
The impending legalization of physician-assisted suicide in the state means that, come August 2026, New York City, a world leader in medicine, will be a city in which health care institutions will be legislatively permitted to help kill their own patients. Regardless of what any ideological rhetoric might claim, a city is known for world-class healthcare when its health services aim for health and life. A city is not known for world-class healthcare because its “healthcare” consists of the cessation of medical treatment and the intended deaths of patients.
True healthcare practitioners, and true healthcare, deliver health and life. Understanding health care practitioners’ role as healer, the world’s highest-ranked oncology hospital in Newsweek’s 2026 rankings, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) in Manhattan, will have nothing to do with killing their patients. Memorial Sloan Kettering states explicitly that:
MSK does not participate in [physician-assisted suicide] for any patient, even if they live in a state where [physician-assisted suicide] is legal . . . None of our doctors, nurses, or staff members at any MSK location can participate in [physician-assisted suicide]18
Governor Hochul’s decision might ultimately end lives and severely jeopardize New York City’s reputation for world-class healthcare, but the world’s highest-ranked cancer hospital, located in New York City, is stating that it—at least now, and all truth-lovers would hope for always—aims to continue being the world’s top cancer hospital—which, quite simply, is done by doing what all true healthcare does: providing medical treatment to the sick.
MSK is not declaring anything radical in its refusal to engage in PAS. The true physician does not kill, but cures; the true physician cares for and ac-companies his patient; the true physician does not give up on his patient and confirm his patient’s despair by facilitating the actualization of his patient’s suicidal ideation.
Suicide Is Suicide
New York’s “Aim for Zero Suicides” plan will be illogical if it is not simultaneously decommissioned upon PAS’s legal enactment when state government will begin active, direct facilitation of suicides within state healthcare networks.
One cannot logically square on the one side state government attempting to halt suicides and on the other the simultaneous promotion, endorsement, and help in carrying out this same act of intentional self-murder by way of physician-assisted suicide.
Neither can it be logically squared that an initiative attempting to prevent suicides in healthcare systems will, potentially, be active in the very same healthcare systems in which simultaneously occurring is the facilitation of suicides. The state’s Suicide Prevention Center announcement for the healthcare field that “suicide deaths for individuals under the care of health and behavioral health systems are preventable”19 is illogical if the state will be facilitating suicides in those very facilities.
How Governor Hochul’s proclamation for Suicide Prevention Month, that “ . . . we honor the lives lost to suicide, support the survivors of suicide loss, and reinforce our commitment to mental health and wellness for all . . .”20 would conflict with the act of physician-assisted suicide, is not a difficult logical comparison. The illogic is instantly recognizable, for, as Thomas Aquinas’ Aristotelian argument goes, a most basic ability of a rational being is the ability to understand that something cannot be and not be at the same time.21 If New York State claims that its intention is to prevent suicides, then PAS legalization is illogical and inconsistent with this claim, as the act of a physician-assisted suicide is the act of a suicide, regardless of what ideologies may attempt to claim. Patients with suicidal ideation are persons who are experiencing hopelessness and despair. Serving PAS as an answer to this loss of hope and submergence into despair normalizes suicide as an option in response to what is, in actuality, some combination of spiritual hopelessness with psychological, emotional, or existential malaise. The lethal response of PAS, eliminating the patient himself, at any rate does nothing to treat nor to cure the patient’s ailment or contribute to the whole patient; quite simply, PAS eliminates the whole patient.
With physician-assisted suicide legalization on the horizon, there will be more victims of suicide in New York—and these victims will not be taking their own lives univocally, which would be tragic enough. In these cases, the victims will be aided in their suicides by a profession whose proper end is the exact opposite of death and a state government that—allegedly—seeks to end suicide. (If the previous sentence seems to make no rational sense, the reader is correct, for the whole PAS scheme is illogical and cannot be made less confusing and contradictory by any writing attempting to convey (irrational) ideas by way of language.)
There are also ancillary effects that cannot be measured—like a teenager struggling with emotional issues and bullying who finds the final justification needed to kill herself because a family member committed a facilitated suicide-by-physician and it was applauded. How bad could suicide be, thinks the girl to herself one day after her family member committed a physician-assisted suicide in celebratory fashion? The Catholic bishops of New York State, in a joint statement following Hochul’s announcement, ask, pointedly, a similar, logical question: “How can any society have credibility to tell young people or people with depression that suicide is never the answer, while at the same time telling elderly and sick people that it is a compassionate choice to be celebrated?”22
In a recorded press conference mired in, and with, illogic, contradiction, shameless sophistry, and twisted rhetoric with no relationship to truth, Hochul called the pro-PAS special interest groups, sponsoring politicians, and advocates gathered with her to announce the legalization agreement between her and the legislature as “heroes” and “great champions.”23 Hochul further claimed that for those advocates who supported PAS because of a loved one’s death, the living loved ones can be assured that those who died are now memorially “honored” by this legislation.24
One is anything but “honored” by the legalization of a bill that will end lives and have both quantifiable and non-quantifiable deleterious effects on both broader society’s and healthcare practitioners’ mindsets on the meaning of life and the aim of healthcare. (One should also be wary of any so-called loved ones who would rather see one dead than alive.)
Rather than, as governor of New York, seeking to align her constituents with a proper moral compass, understood rightly, on basic issues, Hochul chose passions, special interest group rhetoric and pressure, and momentary cultural, political, and ideological sentiments that are approving of the objectively abhorrent act of a so-called medical profession actively assisting vulnerable healthcare patients with their own suicides.
Hochul’s declaration for Suicide Prevention Month last year lit Lower Manhattan’s Freedom Tower in the anti-suicide colors of purple and teal. For the sake of logical consistency, it will be necessary for Governor Hochul, upon PAS’s legalization, to promulgate another proclamation declared specifically for “Physician-Assisted Suicide Prevention Month.”
A “Physician-Assisted Suicide Prevention Month” would aim to raise awareness against suicide-by-physician and to denounce those alleged “healthcare” practitioners who aid and abet suicides in their so-called “health clinics.” Rather than illuminated in purple and teal, for this new “Physician-Assisted Suicide Prevention Month,” the Freedom Tower could be directed to be lit in red and orange. Red and orange are common tablet colors of two drugs of the five-drug lethal cocktail combination “DDMAP” (diazepam, digoxin, morphine sulfate, amitriptyline, and phenobarbital) with which PAS victims most commonly killed themselves in New York’s sister state of New Jersey, where the practice is already legal, in 2024.25
NOTES
1. New York State Assembly, “Assembly Bill A09515,” 2025-2026 Legislative Session, introduced January 12, 2026, “Summary”; and “Actions, https://nyassembly.gov/leg/?default_fld=&leg_ video=&bn=A09515&term=2025&Summary=Y&Actions=Y; and New York State Office of the Governor, press release, “Governor Hochul Signs Medical Aid in Dying Act [sic] into New York State Law,” February 6, 2026, https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-signs-medical-aid-dying-act-new-york-state-law
2. Office of the Governor, press release, “Governor Hochul Reaches Agreement With State Legislature to Pass Medical Aid in Dying [sic] Act in New York,” December 17, 2025, https://www. governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-reaches-agreement-state-legislature-pass-medical-aid-dying-act-new-york; and Bill Miller, “Gov. Hochul to Sign Assisted Suicide Bill in New York,” The Tablet, December 17, 2025, https://thetablet.org/gov-hochul-to-sign-assisted-suicide-bill-ny/
3. Office of the Governor, “Governor Hochul Reaches Agreement with State Legislature to Pass Medical Aid in Dying Act [sic] in New York,” December 17, 2025.
4. Governor Kathy Hochul, “Proclamation: Suicide Prevention Awareness Month,” September 1, 2025, Office of the Governor, State of New York, https://hornellsun.com/2025/09/02/governor-hochul-september-is-suicide-prevention-month/
5. Office of the Governor, press release, “Governor Hochul Recognizes Suicide Prevention Month and Announces Statewide Efforts To Help At-Risk New Yorkers,” September 2, 2025.
6. Governor Kathy Hochul, “Proclamation: Suicide Prevention Awareness Month,” September 1, 2025, https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-recognizes-suicide-prevention-month-and-announces-statewide-efforts-help-risk
7. Ibid.
8. Suicide Prevention Center of New York, https://www.preventsuicideny.org/
9. New York State Office of Mental Health: Suicide Prevention Center of New York, “New York State Aim For Zero Suicides Implementation Guide: For Behavioral Health Care, Emergency Departments, & Primary Care Settings: For Youth,” November 2023; https://www.preventsuicideny.org/wp-content/ uploads/2022/11/AIM-for-Zero-Suicides-Implementation-Guide.pdf; and “New York State Aim For Zero Suicides Implementation Guide: For Behavioral Healthcare And Primary Care Settings,” September 2021, https://www.preventsuicideny.org/resource/aim-for-zero-suicides-implementation-guide/
10. Suicide Prevention Center of New York, main webpage.
11. “Proclamation: Suicide Prevention Awareness Month,” September 1, 2025.
12. New York State Education Department, “License Requirements for Physicians,” Office of the Professions, https://www.op.nysed.gov/professions/physicians/license-requirements
13. Hochul, “Governor Hochul Reaches Agreement With State Legislature…”
14. “Assembly Bill A09515,” 2025-2026 Legislative Session, Memo, https://nyassembly.gov/ leg/?default_fld&leg_video&bn=A09515&term&Memo=Y&utm.
15. “The Federalist No. 51 [6 February 1788],” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders. archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0279
16. Gorgias, (522e), in Plato, Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.
17. “Assembly Bill A09515.”
18. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, “Common Questions About Medical Aid in Dying (MAiD) [sic],” October 06, 2025, archived December 30, 2025, https://www.mskcc.org/pdf/cancer-care/patient-education/common-questions-about-medical-aid-in-dying-maid?mode=large.
19. Suicide Prevention Center of New York, main webpage.
20. “Proclamation: Suicide Prevention Awareness Month,” September 1, 2025.
21. Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 94, art. 2, resp.
22. Archdiocese of New York, “NYS Bishops’ Statement on Gov. Hochul’s Plan to Sign Assisted Suicide Bill,” December 17, 2025, https://www.archny.org/posts/nys-bishops-statement-on-gov-hochuls-plan-to-sign-assisted-suicide-bill
23. Governor Kathy Hochul, press conference: “Governor Hochul Reaches Agreement With State Legislature to Pass Medical Aid in Dying Act [sic] in New York,” video, December 17, 2025, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsbs4K4ThGM.
24. Hochul, “Governor Hochul Reaches Agreement with State Legislature . . .,” press conference, video.
25. (The 2024 data is the latest available.) New Jersey Office of the Chief State Medical Examiner, “New Jersey Medical Aid in Dying for the Terminally Ill Act: 2024 Data Summary,” https://ocsme. nj.gov/pdfs/annual_reports/NJMAiD-2024AnnualReport.pdf p. 7; and Ana Worthington, Ilora Finlay, and Claud Regnard, “Efficacy and Safety of Drugs Used for ‘Assisted Dying,’” British Medical Bulletin 142, no. 1 (March 2022): 15–22, https://doi.org/10.1093/bmb/ldac009.
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Original Bio”
Gerard T. Mundy teaches philosophy, including the biomedical ethics curriculum, at a New York City university.
