ALBANY – Governor Hochul announced today (Wednesday) an agreement with the State Legislature to make medical aid in dying available to terminally ill New York residents with less than six months to live.
The bill, with the agreed-upon amendments, will be passed and signed in January, and will take effect six months later.
“New York has long been a beacon of freedom, and now it is time we extend that freedom to terminally ill New Yorkers who want the right to die comfortably and on their own terms,” the governor said.
She said her mother died of ALS, “and I am all too familiar with the pain of seeing someone you love suffer and being powerless to stop it.”
Among the conditions for the right to die are an oral request by the patient for medical aid in dying recorded by video or audio and a mandatory mental health evaluation of the patient seeking medical aid in dying by a psychologist or psychiatrist.
Assemblywoman Amy Paulin (D, Westchester) called the agreement “truly historic” and “gives countless New Yorkers autonomy and dignity they deserve at the most vulnerable moment in their lives.”
She said her sister died “a horrific death from ovarian cancer, and in her final days she was in pain so overwhelming that she begged for death. Her experience is, tragically, the story of so many others.”
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