When, last December, Governor Pritzker signed Rep. Grasse’s bill legalizing assisted suicide in Illinois, this is what the press release said:
To ensure the highest safeguards for patients, the law is effective in September of 2026, which affords participating health care providers and the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) significant lead time to implement stringent processes and protections as outlined in the law.
September 12, the effective date, is fast approaching, but the IDPH has implemented no such “stringent processes and protections.” Only the bare text of the law will define how the process of securing the poison-so-called-medication will work, and that’s devastatingly deficient, both for those who will be at risk of coerced into suicide and those who care for the terminally ill and will be coerced into participating.
Two compelling lawsuits have been filed, one with caregiver-plaintiffs and the other by disabled people themselves, namely a quadriplegic woman, a woman with cerebral palsy, and multiple grassroots organizations of disabled people.
The core of the complaint by the disabled plaintiffs is that, absent true safeguards, ” people with life-threatening disabilities, as a discrete class, will be highly vulnerable to pressure from insurers and hospitals and even physicians to consent to the early loss of their lives.” Once the assisted suicide law is in effect, physicians will no longer have the “core ethical obligation to do no harm.”
Instead, the plaintiffs argue that they will be harmed because the law will place on them the burden to defend themselves against regular conversations by medical providers regarding suicide, and the vague parameters of the assisted suicide program are likely to mean that suicidal ideation will be encouraged rather than counseled against as for non-disabled people.
As the lawsuit states,
On September 12, 2026, when EOLA takes effect, the Defendant State and IDPH will operate a two-track system to respond to suicidal ideation, the traditional suicide prevention track, and alongside it, and only for persons with life-threatening disabilities, the state-sponsored assisted suicide track.
This is serious.
What’s worse, the lawsuit makes it clear that, although a provider is required to refer patients to mental health professionals in the case an assessment of decision-making capacity is needed, in line with the overall lack of clarifying rules, the law “does not provide any standards to guide providers in making this determination, nor does it require training in mental capacity assessment.”
Also, as it is, the law’s definition of “terminal disease” is vague about the matter of actual treatments for diseases, so that a great many conditions which require active medical or other care, including spinal cord injuries or even diabetes, would qualify as “terminal” based on the letter of the law, and in other jurisdictions, suicidal people have “created” a “terminal illness” for themselves by engaging in VSED, or voluntarily stopping eating and drinking. The law requires that doctors mention the existence of hospice and palliative care, but does not require that the state, alongside its creation of the assisted suicide law, actually provide/fund these alternatives.
And, finally, once a patient clears the (very low) bar for demonstrating they are not coerced, in order to obtain the drugs, there is no further documentation or even any witnesses required at the time of death, so that there is no protection against a patient later choosing against suicide but ultimate being compelled by family or caregivers.
The lawsuit by providers highlights serious issues as well, including some issues that you wouldn’t know simply from a general description of the law, but ways in which it interacts with other laws to cause far more harm.
The law formally declares that assisted suicide “is part of general medical care,” and declares that the provisions of the Health Care Right of Conscience Act (HCRCA) apply to the case of assisted suicide — and despite this law’s title, it doesn’t actually protect conscience rights. Instead, here’s the lawsuit’s explanation of those issues:
HCRCA mandates that health care facilities adopt protocols under which medical personnel “shall inform a patient of the . . . risks and benefits of” all their “treatment options in a timely manner, consistent with the current standards of medical practice or care”— even if the patient has not asked about a particular option.
In other words, healthcare professionals will be required to describe assisted suicide as one option among many, and to explicitly state the benefits of assisted suicide, which are by law defined to exist.
The providers also object to the requirement that they cannot prevent their employees or “individual practitioners” that they contract with, from promoting assisted suicide to the facility’s patients. Worse, the law’s prohibition of “misinformation” on assisted suicide is so vaguely defined as to put anti-assisted suicide doctors at risk of being penalized for trying to persuade patients not to commit suicide. As written, the law states that, by legal declaration, so-called “aid in dying” does not constitute suicide, so that a doctor could be professionally penalized for simply stating the plain fact that it is, in fact, suicide.
This is all bad news.
A doctor who objects to assisted suicide could have his or her license taken away and find $10,000 for each violation. Nursing homes which fail to discuss the “benefits” of assisted suicide could be deemed “abusive” and shut down. Hospitals, too, are at risk of penalties as severe as loss of operating license if they do not comply, since assisted suicide is now officially a part of the standard of care in Illinois.
And this all affects patients as well. If the law places doctors at risk if they fail to list assisted suicide as among the range of options once someone’s disease is deemed to be terminal, we are simply no longer talking about providing an option for a small group of people who seek it out.
Rep. Grasse failed the people of Illinois with a law without true protections.
Gov. Pritzker failed the people of Illinois by failing to create regulations that might have mitigated the worst of the harms.
As your next District 53 State Representative, I will work to create a bipartisan coalition to reform this law.