Lessons from Illinois legalizing assisted suicide.

Gordon Friesen

Gordon Friesen
President, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed assisted suicide bill SB 9 into law on December 12, 2025. The law will go into effect on September 12, 2026.

I spent a day in the distasteful task of pouring through new medical homicide legislation from the State of Illinois, to see what the citizens of that State may now expect, and to find lessons for others.

Illinois has done nothing new with eligibility and process. The common limits of terminal condition, self-ingestion, and state-residency have all been maintained.

However, any relief felt on that account would be misplaced. For this new law is no less sinister for its familiarity.

Indeed, it is a great error to think only of the scope of choice allowed to those who seek death. We must also (and even more urgently) consider what has been taken from those who wish to live.

To be perfectly clear: the only way for patients to enjoy real medical care, is for institutions to exclude medical homicide. But institutions in Illinois will no longer be able to do that.

We can forget public institutions, of course. For these will all become MAID-compliant. But worse still, not even private institutions are now effectively able to protect their patients.

For it is not enough to forbid the actual practice of medical homicide. It is also necessary to recruit and maintain teams of truly life-affirming professionals. And that is where the problem lies.

Illinois law, is typical in this regard. It allows institutions to prevent their employees from practicing medical homicide, but only on their own premises, and only while working within the terms of their employment. Nor can these be prevented from contracting with patients, privately, to act outside of those bounds.

Furthermore, nothing whatever can prevent death-biased professionals from raising the subject of medical homicide, under pretext of presenting all treatment options, according to accepted standards of care respecting informed consent.

In other words, an institution may prohibit the actual practice of medical homicide on-site. But it cannot stop its employees from marketing that service to patients, nor even from contracting with them to provide that service off-campus.

Also, in a specially perverse twist: Illinois statutes harshly condemn "coercion and undue influence", but does so equally, in regard to both steering people towards medical homicide, and attempting to steer them away.

Finally, this effective ban on traditional medicine is made functionally universal, by a definition of regulated "health care entities" which includes every conceivable form of hospital, clinic, long-term care, palliative care, hospice, home-care or nursing service.

Taken all together, we see that no patient, might ever reliably find any place, in the State of Illinois, where they might not be harassed --in their most vulnerable moments-- by doctors (and nurses) who are fully committed (and sordidly attracted) to the satisfaction of killing people.

But even if such a patient were to find the care of a real Hippocratic doctor, that doctor's hands would still be tied from fear of being disciplined (or sued) for "undue" influence in attempting to help patients to continue living.

This then is the lesson for other States considering similar legislation:

Libertarians beware! Death-medicine and Life-medicine are mutually exclusive. Medical homicide is not about providing a choice of death for some. It is about taking real medical care away, from all. 

Previous articles by Gordon Friesen (Articles Link).