The Tikvah Podcast

In December 2025, Governor Kathy Hochul reached an agreement with the New York state legislature to pass the Medical Aid in Dying Act, which would legalize what proponents call "death with dignity" and what critics call physician-assisted suicide. About a dozen other states already permit doctors to prescribe lethal medication to terminally ill patients who request it. The state of Oregon pioneered this practice in 1994 and it has since spread across the Western world. Now, there are people who have an ailing parent or grandparent or, God forbid, a child who is genuinely suffering—suffering in agonizing ways that make the cessation of that suffering seem like the only humane response. It would be inhuman not to acknowledge the enormous emotional, psychological, and physical burdens of that pain, or to minimize it. But the question of physician-assisted suicide ultimately is one about medical ethics as upheld by the physician, the distorting market effects of this practice, and social policy. What happens when