You have probably heard the terms “assisted suicide,” “medical aid in dying,” “death with dignity,” and “euthanasia,” which are often used interchangeably, but they are distinct concepts, according to Dr. Jonathon Treem, of the University of Colorado Palliative Care.
Euthanasia refers to a provider administering a lethal medication to end a patient’s suffering and life, while physician-assisted suicide is when a patient takes a prescribed lethal dose of medication to end their own suffering.
Medical aid in dying is when a terminally ill patient takes a prescribed medication to achieve death in line with their own values, regardless of their degree of suffering. (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10184842/)
The article I am sharing here reviews the current legal status of medical aid in dying (MAID) in the United States. You may not be aware of how accessible it is in this country. I’m sharing it to inform you, not advocating for or against it.
These concepts are not synonymous with patients or family choosing a do-not-resuscitate (DNR) status or choosing to forgo any type of life-sustaining treatments. Those situations are not covered by these laws and I’m not addressing them here.
By September, Nearly a Third of Americans Will Live in States With Legal Aid in Dying (2026)
By Paula Span,
Jules Netherland traveled from her home in the Bronx to the New York State Capitol in Albany several times in the past few years, hoping to persuade the legislature to pass a medical aid-in-dying bill, allowing terminally ill patients to end their lives with a lethal prescription.
She spoke at rallies. With other members of the advocacy organization Compassion & Choices, she visited legislators’ offices. In 2024, as the state Assembly was debating the aid-in-dying bill, she helped unfurl a banner in the chamber gallery that read, “Stop the Suffering.”
Her activism was becoming difficult. Netherland, who is 59 and works for a nonprofit, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2019. “I did a full year of aggressive treatment,” she said. “Chemotherapy. A mastectomy. Radiation treatment every weekday for five weeks. Six months of two oral medications.”
She recovered and felt well until the cancer returned a few years later. Although metastatic breast cancer is incurable, drugs are keeping her disease at bay for now. Netherland feels fortunate but also fatigued, and she contends with brain fog, gastrointestinal symptoms, and joint pain.
“My energy is really limited,” she said.
As she emailed and called legislators, Netherland feared she might die before the aid-in-dying bill — first introduced in New York in 2016 — could become law.
‘A Breakthrough Moment’
On June 9, 2025, after the Assembly approved the bill, Netherland was in the state Senate chamber, watching the aye votes mount, and seeing it pass. Gov. Kathy Hochul signed an amended version in February; it is scheduled to take effect Aug. 5.
A similar law is slated to take effect in September in Illinois, which would become the 13th state (plus the District of Columbia) where medical aid in dying is legal. (California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, Washington, D.C., and permitted in Montana by court ruling.)
“A breakthrough moment,” said Kevin Díaz, president of Compassion & Choices, which has spearheaded the long campaign for such laws. After almost 30 years — Oregon’s law, the first in the country, was enacted in 1997 — the addition of two populous states means that almost a third of Americans will live in one where medical aid-in-dying is legally available. “It shows that there’s broad support for this model,” Díaz said.
Polls consistently back that claim. A Pew Research Center survey last spring found that almost two-thirds of respondents didn’t consider the practice “morally wrong,” either because they thought it was acceptable or not a moral issue.
Support crossed many political and religious lines: A narrow majority of Republicans and 76% of Democrats both found “physician-assisted death” (also sometimes called “physician-assisted suicide”) permissible; so did most Catholics, Jews, and nonevangelical white Protestants.
In New York, a Siena poll found that 54% of respondents supported aid in dying, including majorities of men and women, of all age groups, and of city, suburban, and upstate residents. A plurality of Latinos supported it; Black respondents narrowly opposed it.
Passing these laws has grown somewhat easier, said Thaddeus Pope, a bioethicist and professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, who tracks such policies. “You can say, ‘We have 10 years in California, 18 years in Washington, and 29 years in Oregon, and nothing bad has happened.’ It becomes more accepted.”
‘You Need A, B, and C’
Yet legalizing medical aid in dying, or MAID, has been and remains a long, contentious process. Catholic leadership and many disability organizations staunchly oppose it. (Pope Leo XIV personally asked Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker not to sign the bill.)
The American Medical Association says that “physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer” and poses “serious societal risks.” However, a number of state medical organizations have opted to remain neutral or, as in New York, to support passage.
The Patients’ Rights Action Fund, through a sister organization, has lawsuits pending or on appeal in California, Delaware, and Colorado, arguing that aid in dying laws discriminate against people with disabilities by steering them toward physician-assisted suicide instead of treatment.
“This is a litigation strategy we’ve developed to ultimately get to the Supreme Court,” said Matt Vallière, the group’s executive director, who declined to say whether it would sue to block the Illinois and New York laws.
Even when aid-in-dying laws succeed, using them can prove challenging. In every state (except Montana, where it became legal through a court decision, so there is no statute governing eligibility), aid-in- dying is available only to people with incurable illnesses who are expected to die within six months.
It typically involves oral and written requests to two doctors, with mandated waiting periods between requests. Patients must have the mental capacity to make the decision, which disqualifies those with dementia, and they must ingest the medication without assistance. (An amendment Hochul insisted on adds a psychologist or psychiatrist to the process.)
All but two states require patients to be residents. Oregon and Vermont scrapped their residency requirements to settle lawsuits brought by Compassion & Choices. (Courts ruled against a similar suit in New Jersey.)
Moreover, any doctor, hospital, or healthcare system can legally decline to provide aid-in-dying, and religiously affiliated institutions often opt out. Those who participate can add their own requirements.
“The state can say ‘You need A, B, and C,’ and Columbia-Presbyterian can say, ‘We also want D, E, and F,’” said Pope, the Minnesota bioethicist.
Hotly Debated, Seldom Used
Perhaps these restrictions, or a lack of public awareness, help explain why, despite the headlines and fervent debates, the number of people who actually use the law is tiny in every state — usually 1% or fewer of the deaths recorded annually. The support for giving patients this kind of autonomy at the end of life remains widespread, but the desire to personally exercise it apparently is not.
Still, after studies showed that many patients seeking MAID were dying before they could complete the process, the trend has been to loosen restrictions. California cut its 15-day waiting period to 48 hours; New Mexico allows physician assistants and advanced-practice nurses to write prescriptions along with doctors.
“Most states have now amended their laws two or three times,” Pope said. “We have liberalized.” Telehealth can also facilitate access to participating doctors.
Compassion & Choices is planning legal challenges to end residency requirements in additional states, Díaz said. It is also considering how to “make inroads in jurisdictions with a much different cultural and political environment,” he added, mentioning Florida and other Southern states.
Medical aid in dying represents a shift in power, Díaz said. “The person who has to bear the burden of the suffering should have the ability to decide when it’s enough,” he added.
Anne Gurnett Bander, 72, a retired research scientist in Carmel, New York, cared for her husband for four years as ALS — the relentlessly disabling neurological disorder also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease — rendered him bedridden and dependent on feeding and breathing tubes. “By the time he died, the only thing he could do was nod his head,” she recalled.
So being diagnosed with ALS herself last year was “my worst possible nightmare,” Gurnett Bander said. She was planning to fly to Switzerland, where the nonprofit organization Dignitas provides medical aid in dying, when she learned about the New York bill and began speaking publicly in support of it, her voice faltering as her illness advanced.
Gurnett Bander and Netherland say they’re not certain they’ll use lethal drugs to end their lives as their symptoms intensify. Not infrequently, patients complete the necessary steps, secure the prescribed medication, decide they don’t need it after all, and die of their diseases. But both women insist that the choice should be theirs.
“It can offer so much peace of mind,” Netherland said. “I thought, ‘People should have this option.’ Now, they will.”
The New Old Age is produced through a partnership with The New York Times.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Medical assistance in dying in Canada
Medical assistance in dying (MAID) is a process that allows someone who is found eligible to be able to receive assistance from a medical practitioner in ending their life. The federal Criminal Code of Canada permits this to take place only under very specific circumstances and rules.
Anyone requesting this service must meet specific eligibility criteria to receive medical assistance in dying. Any medical practitioner who administers an assisted death to someone must satisfy certain safeguards first. Learn more at the link.
Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide in the United Kingdom
According to the NHS, both euthanasia and assisted suicide are illegal under English law. The UK Parliament is considering a Terminally Ill Adults Bill that would “allow adults who are terminally ill, subject to safeguards and protections, to request and be provided with assistance to end their own life; and for connected purposes.”(as of May 14, 2026)
Christian Medical and Dental Association
Position Statement Abstract on Medically Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia
“Medically-assisted suicide and euthanasia (MAS & E) are morally controversial practices because they intentionally cause death and thereby contradict the Judeo-Christian and Hippocratic traditions of medical ethics which call for curing and caring, not killing. Though medically-assisted suicide has been legalized in several jurisdictions in the United States, and euthanasia has been legalized in a limited number of other countries, public and professional debates persist about the ethics of MAS & E and the harmful consequences of their legalization.
Some people may want to have access to MAS & E because of the possibility of physical or mental decline, losing control of their lives, becoming a burden to others, or experiencing severe pain or other symptoms, or the fear thereof.
In response to such concerns about suffering, healthcare professionals should provide excellent palliative care which respects life and supports the whole person. They should not endorse self-destructive notions of autonomy and mistaken notions of dignity which devalue the lives of those who suffer.
Based on a biblical account of life, death, killing, suffering, freedom, and love, Christians hold that the goodness of every human life is not diminished by suffering or disability, and that dying patients need compassionate care, not interventions that disrespect life by ending it.”
Read the Full Policy Statement
Your Review and Response
Your state may not have a medical aid-in-dying law now, but the idea should prompt us all to think about what matters at the end of life. Whether you would ever consider MAID or not, reflect on a few questions that could make your end-of-life experience more aligned with your values and less stressful for you and your family.
How do my moral, spiritual, and cultural beliefs shape the way I think about suffering, dignity, and choice at the end of life?
If I faced a terminal illness, what kinds of treatments or interventions would feel supportive — and which would feel burdensome?
What matters most to me at the end of life — comfort, independence, connection, or something else — and how do I want my care to reflect that?
Have I documented my wishes with an advanced directive or similar document? Are my next of kin aware of my wishes and willing to abide by them?
Here is a reference on the various types of
Advance Directives
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