Crime & Law
Federal Judge Rejects Bid to Block Illinois’ ‘Medical Aid in Dying’ Law Days Before It Takes Effect
(Capitol News Illinois)
A federal judge has denied a motion that sought to block a controversial new Illinois law that will allow terminally ill adults to take life-ending medication, just days before that law is set to take effect.
In a 25-page ruling Thursday, U.S. District Judge John Tharp rejected a request for a preliminary injunction that would’ve halted the state’s new End-of-Life Options for Terminally Ill Patients Act, or EOLA, from being implemented beginning Saturday.
That injunction request came as part of a lawsuit filed by a pair of disabled adults, disability rights advocacy organizations and one doctor against Gov. JB Pritzker, the Illinois Department of Public Health and others.
The lawsuit claimed EOLA discriminates against people with disabilities and violated federal laws including the Americans With Disabilities Act and the Affordable Care Act.
They argued in that lawsuit that the disabled plaintiffs are “especially vulnerable to harm” from what they called a “state-imposed scheme of assisted suicide, for the taking of life with no guard rails or protections.”
Thomas Geoghegan, who represents the disability rights groups, physician and disabled Illinoisans who brought the case, told Tharp at a hearing last week that the law upends the millennia-old tradition of the Hippocratic oath, a pledge doctors make to “first do no harm.” As a result, Geoghegan argued, EOLA will result in the “severe impairment” of the relationship a patient with disabilities has with his or her physician.
“All persons who qualify for EOLA are necessarily persons with disabilities protected under federal law,” Geoghegan wrote in the lawsuit's June complaint. “By singling out only these individuals for assisted suicide, with no protections, EOLA devalues their lives and stigmatizes and discriminates against Plaintiffs because they have life-threatening disabilities and should be placed in a lower tier of care.”
But in his ruling, Tharp said the plaintiffs failed to establish that they have a “concrete and imminent future injury” traceable directly to any action or inaction from the defendants.
“The Act exempts healthcare professionals from any duty to provide aid-in-dying care, states that a healthcare provider ‘may choose not to engage in aid-in-dying care,’ and provides that ‘only willing healthcare professionals shall provide aid-in-dying care in accordance with the Act,’” Tharp wrote, adding that given that amount of discretion afforded to doctors, the plaintiffs “cannot establish an immediate, imminent risk that all doctors will start inviting disabled patients to consider medical aid in dying.”
EOLA only applies to adults with less than six months to live — a prognosis that must be confirmed by two independent physicians. Patients must make the request for lethal medication both verbally and in writing, and doctors are required to inform them of alternate hospice care and pain control options.
“If a patient requests medical aid in dying,” Tharp wrote, “the Act mandates a lengthy process to determine the patient’s qualifications and allow the patient time to consider the decision. … The Act does not allow anyone but a patient to initiate medical aid in dying, and the patient can rescind the decision at any time.”
While the lawsuit itself will continue, as part of his ruling Tharp on Thursday removed Pritzker as a defendant in the case and gave the plaintiffs 30 days to show cause why the entire action should not be dismissed for lack of standing.
Capitol News Illinois contributed to this report.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
