Pressure to expand New Jersey assisted suicide law.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Dana Difilippo reported for the New Jersey Monitor on August 28, 2024 that the assisted suicide lobby is pressuring the New Jersey government to expand their assisted suicide law. Difilippo reports:

Since New Jersey lawmakers passed an aid-in-dying law five years ago, the number of terminally ill patients who have sought to end their lives by self-administered medication has jumped almost tenfold.

Now, advocates are working on two fronts to push state policymakers to “course-correct” the law and make it more accessible to people nearing death with unbearable pain and suffering.

They want to abolish a provision in the law that restricts it to New Jersey residents. Two terminally ill patients from Delaware and Pennsylvania and two New Jersey doctors sued the state last summer, calling the residency restriction discriminatory and unconstitutional.

They also want state legislators to move on a stalled bill that would allow doctors to waive the mandatory 15-day waiting period after patients’ initial requests for life-ending medication. The wait was meant as a safeguard but instead has become a barrier, supporters say.

As I have written in previous articles, nearly every US State that has legalized assisted suicide later expanded their law (Link to article).

According to Difilippo the assisted suicide lobby is pressuring the New Jersey government to waive the waiting period and remove the residency requirement. The waiting period protects people from dying at the low point in their life while the residency requirement prevents the state from becoming a suicide tourist destination. 

Difilippo reports that assisted suicide deaths have grown steadily in New Jersey:

In the past five years, doctors in New Jersey have evaluated and approved almost 300 people to end their lives by self-administering prescribed medication, with the number steadily climbing from 12 in 2019 to 101 last year, according to the Office of the Chief State Medical Examiner.

Herb Conaway Jr (D-Burlington) who has sponsored the bill to expand the New Jersey assisted suicide law admits that assisted suicide laws will expand over time. Difilippo reports:

“Most laws need to be adjusted at one point or another, driven by the data that we accumulate in the wake of the initial passage,” Conaway said.

Difilippo reported that Corinne Carey, the Senior campaign director for the assisted suicide lobby stated:

Most states that have legalized aid-in-dying used Oregon’s law as their blueprint, but the waiting period is a “remnant” of that pioneering law that many have since eliminated, Carey said.

The assisted suicide lobby launched a lawsuit to remove the New Jersey state assisted suicide residency requirement.

Last August, two terminally ill women from neighboring states filed a federal lawsuit looking to end New Jersey’s residency requirement for aid-in-dying.

Plaintiffs Judith Govatos, a Wilmington, Delaware, resident with stage-4 lymphoma, and Andy Sealy, a Philadelphia resident with metastatic breast cancer, wanted to apply for life-ending medication under New Jersey’s law but couldn’t because of the residency requirement, according to the complaint.

Pasik, founder of New Jersey Death with Dignity, and Dr. Paul Bryman, a geriatrician and medical director of a Camden County hospice, joined as plaintiffs, saying the requirement prevents them from treating out-of-state patients because of potential criminal or civil liability.

Attorney General Matt Platkin asked a judge in January to dismiss the case. There has been no ruling on that motion.

Unlike Oregon and Vermont that withdrew their state assisted suicide residency requirement after the assisted suicide lobby challenged it in court, New Jersey Attorney General Platkin is defending the assisted suicide residency requirement.