The Moral Debate Over Death Facing NY Gov. Hochul

Jules Netherland sent New York Gov. Kathy Hochul a handwritten greeting card earlier this year asking for the right to end her own life, on her own terms.

Netherland, a 58-year-old from the South Bronx, has terminal cancer. She asked the governor to sign a bill known as the Medical Aid in Dying Act, which would authorize physician-assisted death for patients with an incurable diagnosis and less than six months to live.

“I want the choice of a peaceful death at home with my partner by my side,” Netherland wrote. “Cancer treatment is rough, but my death does not have to be one marked by suffering.”

Hochul’s office has received thousands of letters, emails, cards and calls much like the one from Netherland in recent months. They urge her to sign, or veto, the bill that would make New York the 12th state to authorize physician-assisted death in some form. The correspondence, some of which was shared with Gothamist, reveals in stark terms the existential issues of life, death, morality and personal pain facing Hochul as she weighs whether to sign the legislation.

Advocates and opponents of the measure have been inundating the governor’s office with legal arguments, moral pleas and stories of suffering that they hope will catch her eye before she acts on the bill. But nobody seems to have an inkling of which way Hochul is leaning and the governor herself isn’t tipping her hand.

“I hear from a lot of people on that issue,” Hochul told reporters recently. “There are strong views on both sides of the spectrum — intense views on this. And I’m conscious of that, and it’s going to be a very weighty decision on me.”

The Medical Aid in Dying Act would allow physicians to prescribe lethal drugs to a terminally ill patient, but only at the patient’s request. The patient would choose whether and when to take the drugs.

On one side of the debate are a collection of terminally ill New Yorkers — including Netherland — and their loved ones, who spent years urging Albany policymakers to approve the measure they believe could free them from a painful death.

The opposition is led by groups including the state’s Roman Catholic bishops and some disability rights organizations, who say the concept of medically assisted suicide, as they call it, is morally indefensible.

The Catholic Church teaches that life is from conception to natural death. But rather than focusing on religious arguments against the bill, the bishops have honed in on what they see as a lack of safeguards in the measure. They liken the bill to “Pandora’s Box.” The New York State Catholic Conference, which represents the state’s bishops, has made fliers available to parishes with a QR code to send an email to Hochul’s office. “Suicide is not health care,” the flier reads.

Dennis Poust, the Catholic Conference’s executive director, made his case in a letter to Hochul in June. Many faith communities oppose the bill not because of religion, but “because of the impact it will have on vulnerable New Yorkers, who will no doubt feel external pressures to end their lives prematurely – whether from families, insurers, hospitals or elsewhere,” he wrote.

Hochul often speaks of her own Catholic upbringing — including last week, when she delivered remarks at the Forum on Faith in Manhattan . “I was raised as a social justice Catholic,” she said.

Hochul’s tax returns since taking office in 2021 show she and her husband make an annual donation to the Oratory of St. Anthony of Padua, a Roman Catholic church near her Downtown Buffalo condo that celebrates Mass in Latin and, on Sunday mornings, in an English-Italian mix. Father Augustine Hoa Trung Tran, the church’s priest, declined comment for this story.

But Hochul has taken positions that oppose her church in the past, particularly on the issue of abortion. The Democratic governor is staunchly in favor of abortion rights, which the Catholic Church opposes.

Hochul also knows what it’s like to care for a loved one with a debilitating terminal illness.

The governor has publicly referenced her own mother’s death from ALS , or Lou Gehrig’s disease, an incurable diagnosis that would be eligible for physician-assisted death under the bill she must soon decide on. The progressive disease eventually robs patients of their ability to walk, talk and swallow.

A 2014 obituary said Hochul’s mother, Patricia Courtney, died “after a struggle with ALS, with her family at her side.” It happened three months before then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo chose Hochul as his running mate in his 2014 re-election campaign. When Hochul announced $25 million in funding for ALS research in her 2024 State of the State address, she noted the disease “robs millions, like my own mother, of their vitality.”

To this point, the Catholic bishops have shied away from leaning on Hochul’s Catholicism as they ask her to veto the bill. And supporters of the bill have spent their time emphasizing their own personal stories — not the governor’s.

Compassion and Choices, an advocacy group that has pushed the Medical Aid in Dying Act for years, has encouraged its supporters to write the governor regular personal letters and updates that emphasize their struggles with cancer treatment, ALS and any number of other ailments that could result in a painful, prolonged death.

The letters emphasize the bill would allow them to take more control of their death by allowing them to request the lethal drugs and choose whether and when to take them. They also emphasize the safeguards in the bill, such as requiring two physicians to certify the patient has an incurable diagnosis with less than six months to live.

Jeremy Boal, who was a high-ranking executive for the Mount Sinai Health System in New York City when he was diagnosed with ALS in 2023, is among those who wrote to Hochul. These days, he spends much of his time at his home in Columbia County with his wife, Becky Sandler, where he uses a walker to get to a screened-in porch overlooking their goats and chickens.

In his letter, Boal said he fell into a deep depression following his diagnosis. It only began to lift when he realized he had “an option to end my suffering on my own terms, should it be too great for me to bear.”

“I am fortunate to have the means to establish residency in a state where Medical Aid in Dying is legal,” he wrote Hochul. “But thousands of other terminally ill New Yorkers may not have the resources to travel to another state, and I don’t think that anyone should have to leave their home, their support system, and their care team behind for the right to this compassionate option.”

Asked late last month about the bill and how it relates to her own experiences, Hochul said everyone is a product “of our own circumstances and life’s influences.” But she said she has to “not allow that to color my decision-making” when she’s acting on behalf of New Yorkers.

“I do have the ability and have many times embarked on this to separate my personal beliefs, my religious beliefs,” she said. “But I always have a very solid moral code that never leaves me when I make decisions for New Yorkers.”

Hochul has until the end of the year to sign or veto the bill.

Bishop Edward Scharfenberger, who leads Albany’s Roman Catholic diocese, said he has been happy to hear Hochul say she is taking the issue seriously and considering what is best for the entire state.

“What is in the best interest of all of us?” he said. “I think it’s a society that nurtures, that takes care of the most vulnerable people and that does not abandon people who are in pain.”

Assemblymember Amy Paulin, a Democrat from Westchester County who sponsored the bill, said she hopes Hochul will act sooner rather than later.

“ Every day that we delay means that someone is going to die in pain and agony because we haven’t provided this resource for them,” Paulin said.

Story by Jon Campbell/New York Public News Network

Image Credit: Darren McGee- Office of the Governor