Physician Assisted Suicide

For or Against?

© Photo by Dani

In December 2025, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the Medical Aid in Dying Act, allowing terminally ill patients, under defined circumstances, to request physician assistance in ending their lives. For physicians, this law cuts straight to the deepest questions about what medicine is for, who owns the body, and where compassion ends and corruption begins.

Let’s consider the two best arguments on each side.

The strongest argument in favor of medical aid in dying is compassion. Medicine, at its core, exists to reduce suffering. There are clinical situations in which suffering is not theoretical but overwhelming and inescapable. A patient with widespread metastatic cancer to bone, complicated by pathological fractures, unrelenting pain, and loss of mobility, may endure agony that no opioid, nerve block, or palliative intervention can fully relieve. In such cases, death may seem like the only true escape. To insist that medicine must prolong life at any cost can feel less like healing and more like indifference, even cruelty.

The second best argument in favor is autonomy—the idea that if our bodies belong to anyone, they belong to us. We allow patients to refuse life-sustaining treatments, even when refusal guarantees death. We honor do-not-resuscitate orders and withdrawal of ventilators. If self-ownership means anything, it must include the right to decide when suffering has exceeded what one is willing to bear. In this view, the only legitimate judge of that threshold is the patient.

The arguments against are equally weighty.

The strongest objection is ancient and foundational. From the very beginning, medicine defined itself as a profession committed to preserving life, not ending it. The Hippocratic Oath is explicit: “I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked.” For millennia, this prohibition drew a bright moral line. Once physicians cross from healers into agents of death—even at a patient’s request—something fundamental about the profession curdles from within.

The second best objection is the slippery slope argument, and it is hardly hypothetical. In Canada, where medical assistance in dying has expanded rapidly, cases have increased and eligibility has widened beyond terminal illness. Patients seem to be approved for reasons such as loneliness, depression, or social isolation. In some instances, aid in dying has been offered where pain was inadequately treated, or after brief encounters with clinicians who barely knew the patient. Economic pressures, strained healthcare systems, and subtle coercion can turn a “right to die” into an expectation to die.

My opinion is that life is not ours to end. It is not a possession but a trust, and neither patient nor physician has the authority to intentionally take it. That boundary matters. It protects the vulnerable, preserves the integrity of medicine, and resists the creep from exception to expectation. Remove the option of an easy exit, and we are forced to do more, not less—to treat pain aggressively, to address mental health, to work with the family. Compassion is not ending life; it is exhausting every way to ease suffering in the living.

A story from the Talmud comes to mind. Rabbi Hananiah ben Teradyon is condemned to death by the Romans for teaching Torah. He is wrapped in a Torah scroll and burned alive, with wet wool placed over his heart to prolong his suffering. The Roman executioner, moved by the rabbi’s spiritual strength, offers to remove the wool and fan the flames to end his agony—if the rabbi promises him a share in the World-to-Come. The rabbi agrees. The executioner removes the impediment to death—but does not directly kill him—and then leaps into the fire himself. A heavenly voice declares that both have earned eternal life.

The story is multilayered. On one level it draws a clear moral line: relieve suffering, even as death approaches, but do not become its agent. Yet on a deeper level it carries moral ambiguity: how is it that an executioner - one who commits suicide nonetheless - is rewarded at all? Which only makes it seem more relevant. After all, good stories, like human lives, rarely come to an end tied up neatly in a bow.