New York just legalized assisted suicide. Adding insult to injury, the law requires morally or religiously objecting doctors to be complicit in assisted suicides by cooperating with some of its provisions.

Specifically, the Medical Aid in Dying Act requires that the “attending physician” of patients requesting assisted suicide perform specified functions before patients can be prescribed lethal substances, with no apparent opt-out in the law that I could discern for physicians who are morally or religiously opposed to such a request. These mandatory actions include examining the patient to determine whether the illness is terminal, referring the patient to a consulting doctor to approve the assisted suicide, and discussing the “potential risks associated with taking the medication” (among others), the first steps required for a suicidal patient to receive a lethal prescription. That’s forced complicity.

The “attending physician” is defined as “the physician who has primary responsibility for the care of the patient and treatment of the patient’s terminal illness or condition.” This means that, say, a Catholic oncologist faced with a request for assisted suicide would have to begin the assisted suicide bureaucratic process even though he or she would not have to write the actual prescription.

Four orders of Catholic nuns that provide medical services — including the Little Sisters of the Poor, who knows a lot about resisting government policies that would force them to violate their faith — have sued (represented by the Becket Fund) claiming that this and other aspects of the law violate the Free Exercise Clause among other constitutional and legal provisions. (For those interested, here is the Becket Fund press release.)

This brings up a crucial issue beyond the parameters of this particular lawsuit that I think receives too little attention. We are in the midst of a religious freedom crisis caused by a concerted effort to force pro-life, religiously orthodox, and/or Hippocratic Oath believing doctors, nurses, hospitals, and other medical personnel and institutions to either participate in actions they deem immoral or a sin in the medical context — such as abortion, euthanasia, transgender transition procedures, radical reproductive techniques, etc. — or get out of medicine.

Consider: Catholic hospitals have even been sued for refusing to allow transition hysterectomies and sterilization procedures. Democrats at the national level have proposed legislation that would trample religious freedom and gut the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Influential bioethicists such as Ezekiel Emanuel (among many others) have railed against conscience rights for doctors in major medical publications such as the New England Journal of Medicine. 

And those pushing this assault on freedom don’t care if their actions result in a brain drain of talented professionals from medical practice, hospitals close, and talented young people who would be splendid doctors and nurses eschew medical and nursing school because they don’t want to be forced to participate in what they consider to be sinful actions.

I don’t know how it will all turn out. But I do know that medical conscience (as it is known) is one of the most important liberty-related controversies in the country today. The Supreme Court is going to be very busy.