Doctors File Lawsuit to Stop Illinois’ New Assisted Suicide Law

For more than 40 years, Dr. Mary Keen Kirchoff has dedicated her career to caring for the most vulnerable—the disabled, the elderly. She became a doctor to heal, not to help her patients die.

Starting on September 12, the State of Illinois will order her to push suicide on her patients.

Illinois’s new assisted suicide law makes three demands of every doctor in the state:

• Tell patients about the “benefits” of ending their own lives—even patients who never asked.

• Refer them to someone willing to help them die.

• Falsify a death certificate to hide what really happened.

Refuse, and it could mean a $10,000 fine, loss of your medical license, and criminal prosecution.

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“The State’s demand that physicians begin helping patients accomplish assisted suicide violates everything I know as a health care professional, as well as my deeply held Catholic convictions on the dignity of every human life,” says Dr. Keen.

“As a doctor, I have a responsibility to meet my patients’ existential pain with loving accompaniment, not with abandonment.”

But Illinois is demanding she choose between that commitment and her medical license. And because of supporters like you, Steven, she isn’t facing this alone.

Today, Thomas More Society filed a federal lawsuit to stop Illinois’s assisted suicide law before it goes into effect.

We’re representing Dr. Keen and three fellow physicians; the Most Rev. Thomas Paprocki, Bishop of the Diocese of Springfield; and the Lutheran Care Center—a ministry that has served nearly 3,000 patients in southern Illinois.

This law doesn’t just target individual doctors. It conscripts entire institutions—including religious hospitals and nursing homes—into the state’s assisted suicide regime.

Under this law, Catholic hospitals must let their own staff promote assisted suicide on hospital grounds. Those same employees can walk out the door, help a patient kill themselves on the weekend, and come back Monday morning.

The hospital can’t fire them, can’t discipline them, and can’t stop them from doing it again.

Bishop Paprocki is responsible for ensuring that some of the largest Catholic hospital systems in Illinois uphold Church teaching. But the State of Illinois is telling a Catholic bishop his hospitals must violate the directives he’s charged by the Church to enforce—or risk penalties.

“We must be free to serve the sick and the dying according to our faith, not according to the state’s mandate,” says Bishop Paprocki.

And it gets worse. Under this law, assisted suicide officially “does not constitute suicide.” The state has decreed that a patient who takes a doctor-prescribed lethal drug hasn’t committed suicide. Any doctor who says otherwise can be sanctioned for “deploying misinformation.”

This is the sort of doublespeak you would expect to read about in George Orwell’s 1984.

We’re asking a federal judge to freeze this law’s coercive mandates before September 12. That gives us one month as our attorneys work against the clock.

No doctor should be forced to push suicide on her patients.

No state should be allowed to force Catholic hospitals and Lutheran nursing homes to violate their religious missions.

If we succeed, doctors across Illinois will be free to care for their patients according to their conscience and their faith—without the state forcing them to promote suicide. That’s what your gift makes possible.

With your help, we’re going to stop this.