New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) will review a bill passed by the state legislature this week that would allow assisted suicide for terminally ill patients and make the Empire State the twelfth jurisdiction in the U.S. to legalize the procedure.

The New York State Senate on Monday advanced a physician-assisted suicide bill that was passed by the State Assembly in April. The bill moved out of the Senate by a vote of 37 to 25, mostly along partisan lines. 

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A spokesperson for Hochul told the Washington Examiner that the governor “will review the legislation” but did not provide more information. 

The bill requires that a patient have incurable or irreversible illnesses with six or less months to live and have the diagnosis confirmed by two doctors. The patient’s request for life-ending medication must be witnessed by two adults who do not stand to gain an inheritance from the patient.

While the legislature is in session, the governor has 10 days, excluding Sundays, to sign or veto a bill before it automatically becomes law. 

Corinne Carey, New York campaign director for the pro-assisted suicide group Compassion and Choices, said that lawmakers in the state are “leading with love” in the passage of the bill. 

“They have recognized how important it is to give terminally ill New Yorkers the autonomy they deserve of their own end-of-life experience,” Carey said in a statement. “The option of medical aid in dying provides comfort, allowing those who are dying to live their time more fully and peacefully until the end.” 

New York State Assembly Minority Leader Republican Will Barclay told the Washington Examiner that the bill “is a dangerous step that carries irreparable consequences.”

“This legislation is severely flawed, not only in principle, but in lacking appropriate safeguards and requirements necessary to prevent abuse and misapplication,” said Barclay. “We do not honor a person by hastening their death, but by affirming the value of life, even in its final chapter.”

New York State Senate Minority Leader Rob Ortt said in a news conference Monday that the bill illustrates the Democratic Party’s “misplaced” priorities. “Assisted suicide? That’s the priority, with all the issues facing New Yorkers?” he said.

Although Republicans in the state legislature posed the most opposition to the bill, the issue hasn’t been entirely partisan. 

Chairwoman of the Brooklyn Democratic Party, Assemblymember Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, did not support the legislation, saying on the Assembly floor in April that it poses a “great risk of targeting vulnerable communities of color given the historical health disparities that they continue to face.”

A handful of other Democrats, including Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes as well as state Sens. Cordell Cleare, Roxanne Persaud, and Sam Sutton, also voted against the bill. Peoples-Stokes said she “adamantly” opposed the bill and suggested she was grateful her father didn’t die early because he wouldn’t have met his grandson.

“I watched my father die,” she said. “He actually asked me — he wanted to die two years before he did, but he didn’t.”

“And because he didn’t, my grandson got a chance to know him,” she added.

Eleven other states and Washington, D.C., have passed laws permitting physicians to prescribe life-ending drugs to terminally ill adult patients. 

Several European countries and Canada have experimented with such policies for several years. 

HERE ARE THE STATES THAT HAVE OR ARE CONSIDERING PHYSICIAN-ASSISTED SUICIDE

Canada, which has had a nationwide assisted suicide policy since 2021, recently expanded its criteria for those with incurable chronic illness or disabilities. In 2023, physician-assisted suicide accounted for one in 20 deaths in Canada.

Fifteen U.S. states have either held hearings or introduced bills this year on physician-assisted suicide: Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.