Illinois pauses assisted suicide mandate for Catholic nuns, doctors as Canada's law expands

Deep-blue states that require caregivers for children and the elderly to violate their religious beliefs are thinking twice after facing legal challenges, amid nearly a decade of judicial scrutiny on turning people of faith into government mouthpieces for progressive orthodoxy.

Illinois agreed to two temporary restraining orders against compelling Catholic nuns and doctors to facilitate assisted suicide in their hospitals, nursing homes and end-of-life care facilities, in recent challenges by the Thomas More Society and Becket religious liberty law firm. 

The Land of Lincoln's End-of-Life Options for Terminally Ill Patients Act, the first so-called medical aid in dying law in the Midwest, was set to take effect Saturday, the day after the second TRO was approved. The first, primarily for physicians, was Aug. 21, with both cases overseen by U.S. District Judge Franklin Valderrama, nominated by President Trump.

"To be clear, the Church's objection to this statute is not an attempt to impose Catholic teaching on non-Catholics; it is an effort to stop the State from compelling Catholic health care providers to violate their conscience" by helping patients kill themselves, plaintiff Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of Chicago, said in response to the Sept. 11 order, which applies primarily to nuns.

Becket said the law's "gag order" provision is so broad that Illinois could punish nuns for simply telling a patient, "Don’t kill yourself. Jesus loves you. Your life is precious."

New York also paused its assisted suicide law, scheduled to take effect in early August, shortly after nuns challenged it for allegedly requiring them to goad terminally ill patients into killing themselves, a step beyond West Coast, Australia and New Zealand laws that merely allow patients to take their own lives.

The second Illinois order closely followed Oregon agreeing not to condition adoptions on applicants' willingness to treat gender-confused adoptees as the opposite sex and arrange so-called gender-affirming care for them, more than a year after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it would likely lose a First Amendment challenge.

Not taking a chance that it would lose in the 2nd Circuit, Vermont gave up its gender-affirming conditions on foster care earlier this year to settle two lawsuits.

Mocking a 'bed-blocker' for resisting government pressure to die

The state laws encouraging assisted suicide would bring American bastions of progressivism closer to their northern neighbor, Canada, where medical aid in dying isn't limited to terminally ill patients. More than 100,000 Canadians have died through the 2016 federal law, which is scheduled to expand to patients suffering only mental illness in March.

Canadian Roger Foley, whose cerebellar ataxia makes muscle control extremely difficult, told Just the News two years ago that the government has repeatedly pushed him to consider assisted suicide over his objections. "I’m just trying to remain alive and fight for the home care that I need to live," he said.

Foley sued a hospital and several government agencies in 2018 for allegedly pushing him toward death rather than give him the home care of his choosing, sharing recordings of hospital staff threatening to charge him $1,500 a day to stay in the hospital and responding to his complaints about how he's treated by again suggesting he choose death. 

Local media mocked Foley as a "bed-blocker" taking care from people who need it, in reporting on the Ontario Superior Court dismissing his lawsuit and ordering Foley to pay roughly $72,000 U.S. in defendants' legal costs. 

This spring, the Ontario Court of Appeal granted an extension to let Foley's lawyers at the Life Legal Defense Foundation challenge the dismissal, "pursue damages for the abusive treatment Roger has endured" and get the care he seeks. The firm didn't respond Monday when asked for the status of the case.

Foley didn't mention his lawsuit in a Friday essay in the U.K. magazine The Critic, relating his experience in Canada to U.K. Prime Minister Andy Burnham's stated resistance to legalizing assisted suicide until the country improves palliative and social care.

"If a seriously ill person is offered a failing care system that cannot guarantee basic dignity or meet their needs as the alternative to hastening their death, can that decision truly be described as a free 'choice'?" Foley wrote. "An offer of assisted death does not take place in some neutral environment of abstract autonomy."

The Canadian Press purported to fact-check Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. when he told Congress this spring "I think" assisted suicide is "the number-one cause of death" in Canada. Statistics Canada said it attributes those deaths to the "disease or injury that initiated the train of events leading directly to death," not assisted suicide.

May hinge on ruling about compelled speech for pro-life centers

Both Illinois TROs refer to a pending 7th Circuit decision on the state's similar law requiring pro-life pregnancy centers to discuss the "benefits" of abortion with clients as a condition of medical immunity.

President Trump-nominated U.S. District Judge Iain Johnston, who previously doomed what he called a "stupid and very likely unconstitutional" Illinois law on deceptive practices by pro-life centers, struck down the "benefits" requirement as compelled speech but upheld the law's abortion referral provision for when a patient asks for such information.

At oral argument April 10, the Chicago-based appeals court grilled the state's lawyer on her claim that the law is "a viewpoint-neutral standard of care" exempt from First Amendment scrutiny, the Washington Examiner reported. The challengers emphasized the Supreme Court had "reaffirmed free speech rights for healthcare professionals" the week prior.

The Sept. 11 order approved by Valderrama blocks enforcement of "certain provisions" of the End-of-Life Options for Terminally Ill Patients Act and the Health Care Right of Conscience Act "to the extent they are related to acts or omissions under EOLO, pending the issuance of the mandate" from the 7th Circuit in the related pro-life compelled speech case. 

State authorities will not treat the plaintiffs' "noncompliance with any such provisions as a basis for liability, discipline, or licensure action under any law," and the parties will notify Johnston within a week of the 7th Circuit ruling to plan for the plaintiffs' expected motion for preliminary injunction, the order says. 

The Aug. 21 order is substantially the same, just for different plaintiffs. 

The TRO motion had said the blocked provisions of the conscience law "are either identical to, similar to, or raise the same legal issues as all of the provisions" of the assisted suicide law, so the pending 7th Circuit decision "may resolve or at least shed significant further light" on the case.