What Is Assisted Suicide, and Why Should You Care About It?

For nearly four decades, Sean Curran has lived as a quadriplegic. A spinal cord injury at 17 left him needing help with life’s most basic tasks—eating, drinking, personal hygiene. It didn’t stop him from building a 27-year career at J.P. Morgan Private Bank, earning an MBA, raising two sons, and teaching taekwondo and self-defense classes at his church.

But when a bowel obstruction put him in the hospital for months, those joys no longer brought Sean the same passion for life. He says it was the darkest stretch of his life—one in which he briefly lost the will to live. Had Delaware’s End of Life Options Act (EOLOA) been in effect at the time, Curran says nothing in the law would have stood between him and a lethal prescription. Under EOLOA, a disability that leaves someone with a prognosis of less than six months is “terminal”—opening the door to assisted suicide instead of the suicide-prevention care anyone else in crisis should receive.

Curran, along with six disability-rights organizations—including Not Dead Yet and Delaware ADAPT—sued to block EOLOA before it took effect. A federal judge dismissed the case on standing grounds without ruling on its merits, and the law took effect Jan. 1, 2026. Curran’s appeal is now pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit.

His case is a warning other states should heed—but many haven’t.

States across the country have legalized assisted suicide, authorizing doctors and other medical professionals to facilitate death.

Advocates for assisted suicide describe the practice as “death with dignity.” In reality, far too often it’s used as a weapon to target the vulnerable and the sick, harming those who need competent and compassionate medical care and community services.

What is assisted suicide?

Assisted suicide is often mistaken for being synonymous with euthanasia, but the distinction between the two is important. Assisted suicide is when a physician or other healthcare professional facilitates a patient’s death by prescribing him a lethal dose of medication, knowing that the patient will likely commit suicide by taking that lethal dose. Euthanasia is when another person administers the dose or otherwise personally assists in ending a person’s life. With assisted suicide, the patient himself takes his own life with the prior assistance of a medical professional, while euthanasia involves another person directly killing the patient.

Assisted suicide is not the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment; rather, it is the active introduction of a lethal agent into the patient’s body, intentionally causing death.

In states that allow assisted suicide, patients are required to have a “terminal illness” to qualify for lethal drugs. But the laws in these states often have broad definitions of what qualifies as a “terminal illness” for these purposes. In addition, the laws don’t require patients to exhaust available treatment first. Oregon’s law, the model most other states have copied, defines “terminal disease” as one that will “produce death within six months.” Conditions like diabetes—which is treatable—are among those that have qualified patients for the program. That means someone with a treatable disease who refuses treatment, or loses insurance coverage for it, can still be eligible to receive lethal drugs.

What are the harms of assisted suicide?

Assisted suicide poses two main problems:

1. Assisted suicide laws facilitate a culture of death

Assisted suicide laws do more than allow doctors to help patients end their lives. By making suicide easier to access, they foster a culture of death that is hard to reverse once it takes hold.

For example, look at the role that insurance companies play in assisted suicide. There have been instances where insurance companies have offered to pay for lethal drugs instead of treatments for terminal illnesses. Sadly, it’s easy to see why they would do that: Insurance companies are businesses, so it makes economic sense for them to cover assisted suicide instead of expensive life-sustaining treatments.

Further, some assisted suicide laws have dangerous loopholes regarding when and where patients may end their lives. Once the patient has the lethal dose, there is no accountability as to what happens next. No one has to watch the patient take the prescription, and no one is ensuring that the patient administers it himself and that only the intended patient takes it.

Assisted suicide laws devalue life and trivialize death, creating a slippery slope to a culture of convincing and pressuring the vulnerable to end their lives prematurely.

2. Assisted suicide laws violate the rights of conscience of objecting medical professionals

Assisted suicide laws compromise the medical profession, turning doctors’ Hippocratic Oath on its head. Participating in a patient’s suicide is anything but upholding the promise not to “give a lethal drug to anyone.” In fact, the American Medical Association’s Code of Ethics calls assisted suicide “fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer” and says it “would pose serious societal risks.”

That’s not some relic, sitting untouched. In June 2025—the same week New York’s legislature voted to legalize the practice—AMA delegates reaffirmed that position by a supermajority, rejecting a push to rebrand it as “medical aid in dying.” The AMA’s Board of Trustees said softer terminology risks blurring assisted suicide with legitimate end-of-life care, and that the resulting ambiguity has no place in ethical guidance for physicians.

While most laws legalizing assisted suicide affirm the right of healthcare professionals to decline to write prescriptions for lethal medication, some laws have required them to provide, upon request, information about assisted suicide to patients and to refer and transfer patients to another provider for lethal prescriptions. Some laws also limit the conscience rights of healthcare institutions. A religious hospital, for example, may bar assisted suicide on its premises yet be unable to stop its own physicians from prescribing lethal drugs elsewhere. Such requirements violate the consciences of many healthcare professionals and institutions.

And assisted suicide isn’t just an issue for religious people. In Massachusetts, for example—where ADF attorneys filed an amicus brief in defense of the commonwealth’s prohibition on the practice and argued the case in court—an atheist academic also filed a brief supporting the law. Dr. Kevin Yuill of the University of Sunderland in the U.K. wrote that assisted suicide “can never be implemented in a safe and limited way.”

“Rather than seeing the debate in the simplistic terms of outdated religious precepts versus secularism,” he wrote, “we should analyze the value of so-called Christian precepts such as Thou Shalt Not Kill before we jettison them entirely.”

Which states allow assisted suicide?

Currently, 13 states and the District of Columbia allow assisted suicide—up from 10 just a few years ago. Delaware and New York joined the list in 2026, and in September 2026, Illinois became the first Midwestern state to legalize the practice, with its law taking effect despite multiple last-minute lawsuits seeking to block it. In recent years, we’ve seen a steady stream of states consider this deadly path, and unfortunately, more states attempt to legalize assisted suicide every legislative session.

Moreover, the states that have already legalized assisted suicide are going back and amending their current laws to make it even easier for patients to access lethal medication. Vermont eliminated its requirement that patients meet in person with a physician before requesting lethal drugs. Oregon and Colorado now allow same-day dispensing of the drugs in some cases, and California has shortened its waiting period from 15 days to just 48 hours between the first and second requests. Oregon and Vermont have also dropped their residency requirements entirely, turning both into destination states for people from anywhere in the country seeking a lethal prescription.

These amendments are not only problematic expansions of the ability to legally facilitate suicide, but they also demonstrate how even those bills that seem somewhat protective or were designed as a compromise still pave the way to further expansion of assisted suicide.

How is ADF working to combat assisted suicide?

At ADF, we believe that all life, from the moment of conception to natural death, is precious. Assisted suicide targets the lives of some of the most vulnerable Americans, so we have been actively working to combat this deadly practice.

Defending state laws that protect vulnerable lives

First, ADF has defended multiple state laws that protect life by prohibiting assisted suicide. In Vacco v. Quill, three physicians sued the state of New York for prohibiting them from facilitating their patients’ deaths. This was before the state had legalized assisted suicide. A federal district court upheld the law, but an appellate court said the law was unconstitutional.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the case alongside Washington v. Glucksberg, another case in which physicians were challenging a state’s prohibition of assisted suicide, this time in Washington. ADF provided strategic support and funding and coordinated amicus briefs in support of both laws. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld both the New York and Washington laws, ruling that the Constitution does not confer a right to assisted suicide and that states are free to make their own laws regarding the practice.

ADF also successfully defended a Massachusetts law prohibiting assisted suicide against a challenge from two doctors. ADF Senior Counsel Chris Schandevel argued before the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court in March 2022, and in December of that year, the court upheld protections for the terminally ill and disabled.

Protecting medical rights of conscience

ADF also works to protect the rights of medical professionals to decline to dispense or refer for life-ending drugs.

One of our first cases in this area was called Vermont Alliance for Ethical Healthcare v. Hoser. In that case, the Vermont state legislature passed a vague assisted suicide bill. According to state medical authorities, the law required healthcare professionals to facilitate their patients’ deaths by informing them about the “option” of assisted suicide even if they declined to dispense the drugs themselves.

Facilitating assisted suicide in this way would have violated the consciences and religious beliefs of medical professionals in the Vermont Alliance for Ethical Healthcare and the Christian Medical & Dental Associations (CMDA), so ADF and Allied Attorney Michael Tierney filed a lawsuit. In 2017, ADF secured a legal victory ensuring Vermont’s law does not force medical professionals to refer or counsel patients for assisted suicide.

ADF attorneys also represented physicians in New Mexico to challenge a state law that required conscientious medical professionals to inform patients about assisted suicide and refer them to someone who would help end their lives. To resolve the lawsuit, the New Mexico legislature passed a new law protecting religious and conscientious objections of medical professionals in the state.

Finally, when California passed a law requiring healthcare professionals to participate in the process of assisted suicide, ADF attorneys filed a lawsuit on behalf of objecting doctors. In 2023, ADF secured a federal court order permanently barring California from forcing medical professionals to participate in the practice.

As more states continue trying to legalize assisted suicide and force healthcare professionals to participate against their religious beliefs and professional ethics, ADF is committed to combatting those efforts and protecting vulnerable lives.

The slippery slope of assisted suicide

Assisted suicide is neither a compassionate nor appropriate solution for those who are suffering. America’s most vulnerable citizens—the elderly, the terminally ill, the disabled, and the depressed—are worthy of life and equal protection under the law. Life should be protected from conception to natural death, and those who object to participating in a culture of death should be defended from being forced to do so.

There is a double standard in our society where we teach suicide prevention while prescribing suicide to the most vulnerable among us. By allowing the legalization of suicide and forcing physicians to be parties to it, we compromise the foundation upon which our society is built: the preservation of life.