This article discusses suicide. If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255).
The 85-year-old retired doctor was charged with manslaughter in upstate New York in February and turned himself in after police and medical officials determined he had traveled from Arizona to New York to help a woman commit suicide.
Several New York state lawmakers are now supporting individuals like former doctor Stephen Miller to ensure that people like him don’t go to prison in the future for their involvement in assisted suicide.
A bill under consideration in the New York State Assembly and state legislature called “medical euthanasia” would give terminally ill patients the option to choose when they want to die, and its longtime sponsor believes it’s close to passing.
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New York State Assemblywoman Amy Paulin (D-Calif.) told Fox News Digital she was “hopeful” the medical-assisted dying bill would pass. (Rep. Amy Paulin)
“I’m very hopeful,” New York Assemblywoman Amy Paulin told Fox News Digital. “We’re very close. I think there’s a very good chance it will pass, but it’s not 100 percent.”
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Pauline, a Democrat, has supported the bill since 2015. Just a year after she introduced the medically assisted euthanasia bill, her family learned her sister’s previous cancer diagnosis had returned.
“By the end the pain got so bad she had no choice but to take strong medicine that essentially put her to sleep or wake up and talk to us, which was what she wanted,” Pauline said.
“When she wasn’t taking drugs to render her unconscious she would scream every few minutes, ‘When am I going to die?'”
The lawmaker acknowledges that assisted suicide was not an option for his sister and that he never discussed whether she wanted to pursue the option.
Polls show that New Yorkers support medical euthanasia by a two-to-one margin, but some policy experts have reservations.
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Alex Thompson, advocacy director for the New York Institute for Independent Living, said people with disabilities already have difficulty getting the care they need and raised concerns about assisted suicide.
“We’ve heard a lot of concerns from our community, especially around access to healthcare, denial of insurance, all the things that people with disabilities go through on a daily basis,” Thompson told Fox News Digital. “The idea that they might not be able to get care and potentially be subjected to assisted suicide is kind of scary.”
Thompson also expressed concern that, once enacted, the protections in the original law could be expanded.
“There’s always a path to expansion. When the bill was being written in New York, I heard proponents of the bill in New York say it’s very limited and has all the protections in place,” Thompson said.
He pointed to two lawsuits in New Jersey and Vermont that seek to expand the original terms of assisted suicide in those states, both of which seek to not limit assisted suicide in those states to just their own residents.
“There are many concerns [how] Maybe they’ll do that in New York too,” Thompson said.
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Assisted suicide is legal in 10 US states. (iStock)
Canada has had assisted suicide legislation since 2016. Last year, Canadian lawmakers began considering whether a mental illness diagnosis should be the only qualification for seeking assisted suicide.
The New York Post reported this month that a healthy 29-year-old Dutch woman has been granted the right to assisted suicide because she suffers from a mental illness. Chronic depression, anxiety, trauma, borderline personality disorder, autism.
The New York State Capitol in Albany. (Fox News Photo/Joshua Cummins)
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Senator Paullin asserts that these types of diagnoses are not sufficient to authorize the use of medical euthanasia in New York state.
“New York’s bill has the strongest protections of any state, but this doesn’t qualify,” she said. “It requires that you’re going to be near death within the next six months, and that has to be certified by your doctor and a second doctor. So it has to be signed by two doctors.”
Assisted suicide is legal in 10 states in the United States: California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. Washington DC has also approved it.
