MAID service

New York State's Medical Aid in Dying Act (MAiD) passed both legislative chambers with flying mourning colors and awaits Governor Hochul's signature as soon as she can gauge the electoral winds and reconcile it with her negotiable conscience.

This law will allow terminally ill patients with a prognosis of less than six months to live, as determined by any two doctors shopped and hired for the purpose. They will no longer have to fear legal repercussions for assisting suicides, and may even make a few extra bucks when word gets around of their specialization and taste for it.

There are many cases of highly inaccurate projections of both length and quality of remaining life.

For patients to be eligible, they will need to be adjudged "mentally capable" of making the fatal decision. But if there's anything that defines the modern era, it's the cynical manipulation of language to create shifting meanings to fit moveable agendas.

Emerging from the shadows of the patients' closing lives, there may be sundry opportunists who stand to gain by their inevitable demise. They may try to capitalize on a state of altered consciousness or awareness, which might be transitory and either natural or artificially triggered by therapeutics.

These influencers might selfishly affirm, validate or even persuade the patient to cash in their chips. When people are sufficiently compromised, they can be nudged over the edge to eternity by the touch of a feather or a whisper. 

Although the "patients" must apply in writing for the killer drugs, which must be signed by a pair of witnesses whose sole qualification is that they are not named as beneficiaries of the deceased-to-be's estate, the safeguards against exploitation are minimal, even though the attending physicians have the right to go through the motions of requesting a psychiatric exam. These are notoriously subjective, especially when the interpreting consultant may not be impartial.

It's unclear what the co-pay would be for shepherding the anguished or confused customer to the permanent cessation of the freedom to reconsider. Even if they are in no pain, and extreme functional deterioration is not anticipated, they can opt to extinguish themselves forthwith.

No doubt insurance companies, providers and lobbyists are already brainstorming possible profit angles. There will be economic inducements and profit incentives. Even within families, there may be some mercenary wrangling and scheming to halt the accelerated erosion of their eventual assets as beneficiaries of Wills and Trusts.

Blood may be thicker than water, but greed is thickest of all.

There may be sleaze in survivorship, but it may be countermanded by the affordable convenience of creature comforts. All under the guise of granting people the liberty of dying on their own terms.

Community organizations and "nonprofits" may, perhaps in exchange for donations, hook up desperate importuners with their network of doctors to make the acquisition of the lethal "medications" copacetic and seamless. 

People have allegedly been known to be granted disability benefits by route of referrals to cultural societies.

Religious groups, suicide interventionists and advocates of disability rights are at the vanguard of opposition to MAID. Some may be driven by narrow doctrines and others by a more pantheistic view of the sanctity of life.

When it goes into effect, a new cottage industry will arise, as it did when cannabis was legalized. Perhaps there will be storefronts for walk-ins. The public will get used to it. Like they did to "Blood Banks" in Times Square in the ‘60s.

State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal said that MAID is "not about hastening death but ending suffering.” Well, it's about both, but he can be forgiven a little rhetorical license.

Medically assisted suicide (a variant of "suicide by cop") is already allowed in 11 other states, and Washington, D.C., where practically everything related to annihilation is smiled on by alternating partisanships, or sometimes two faces at a time.

Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who represents an upstate constituency, called the passage of MAID "disgusting", a "shameful attack,” and a "betrayal of our most vulnerable citizens.” She deems the legislation "radical," driven by the "Far Left" and a normalization of "the termination of life under the guise of compassion."

She claims it enables a coercive "culture of death" which conveys the message that precious and cherished human lives are "expendable." John Ketcham, s contributing editor of City Journal,  surmises "a compassionate government does not offer its sick a cup of hemlock.”

Nice classical reference there. Obviously not a recent graduate of our educational systems.

The MAID law states that the death certificate of a patient who died from self-administered drugs should reflect solely the underlying condition and make no mention of the immediate cause.

Assembly Minority Leader William Barclay warns that this law will open a "Pandora's box" that will "lead to new legislation well beyond the intended scope of the original." He urges greater investment in hospice, palliative care and mental-health services.

Incredibly, the MAID law reportedly does not require physicians to physically examine the patient in person. It can be done by Zoom. Ordered online like generic Viagra.

Life is never held so dear that it can hold out for long against being cheapened. People practically yawn when they hear about strangers' lives being destroyed by mental instability, chemical imbalances, homelessness and complications of social isolation. 

Nothing is so big a deal anymore that we as a society can't get used to it. All that further detracts from the dignity of civilization comes with the territory of existence.

In the Netherlands, cases of assisted suicide are getting as common as field of tulips. There is growing enthusiasm for legislation that would allow senior citizens over 74 the option of extinguishing themselves for any reason (perhaps boredom), or none at all.

According to CBS News, 101 people in New Jersey submitted themselves to MAID service in 2023. Most of them were over 65, female and white. For many, it was the final and ultimate triumphant cry of autonomy. For some others, it may have been an economic decision to spare their loved ones the bankruptcy associated with end-term care.

In our country, business models are the crucible of everything, including transitioning to eternity. Will the life insurance policy clauses that deny payouts to the beneficiaries of suicides be retired? Life and Death have been known to hinge on minutia and footnotes.

At a class on suicide prevention that my colleagues and I were mandated to attend some years ago, a video was shown of a man who had survived multiple suicide attempts and then decided to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge, where the "success" rate topped 98 percent. Miraculously he beat the odds. It profoundly altered his grasp of life and the duty of joy.

He said, "There was a millisecond of free fall. In that instant, I thought what have I just done? I don't want to die. Please save me!" Maybe some of the accommodated MAID petitioners would also have sought to reverse the irreversible.