Temporary injunction protects conscience rights for some Illinois doctors.

Alex Schadenberg
Executive Director, Euthanasia Prevention Coalition

Disability leaders opposing assisted suicide

On December 12, 2025 we reported that Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed assisted suicide bill SB 9 into law. The Illinois assisted suicide law is scheduled to go into effect on September 12, 2026.

On August 13, 2026 we reported that a group of Illinois physicians, a Catholic bishop and a faith-based nursing home filed a federal lawsuit seeking to block Illinois’ assisted suicide law before it goes into effect.

On August 24, 2026 Molly Sweeney reported for WCIA news that Illinois agreed to a temporary order pausing assisted suicide law for certain hospitals and doctors. Sweeney wrote:

With the temporary injunction, Catholic hospitals under the authority of the Diocese of Springfield, the Lutheran Care Center in Altamont and the four Catholic doctors named in the lawsuit will not be required to comply with the new state law while similar cases are resolved in the appeals court.

The Thomas More Society, the legal group that took the case, stated in their Press Release on August 24 that:

In the near term, the order means that when the law takes effect on September 12, the named plaintiffs may keep serving their patients according to conscience. Illinois cannot force them to tout the alleged “benefits” of assisted suicide, refer patients to someone willing to prescribe lethal drugs, log those requests in a way that triggers the state’s suicide “qualification” process, avoid engaging in whatever the state decides is “misinformation” about suicide, or falsify death certificates to conceal how a patient died. Nor may the state pursue the penalties the law otherwise threatens for refusing: fines of up to $10,000 per violation, loss of licensure, and criminal prosecution.

Peter Breen, Executive Vice President and Head of Litigation at Thomas More Society also stated that:

“We will not rest until Illinois’s immoral and coercive assisted suicide mandate is struck down for good, and every doctor and health care ministry in the state is free to heal without fear of the State’s deadly agenda,”

The decision was entered by U.S. District Judge Franklin U. Valderrama on August 21, 2026. (Link to the decision).