Federal judge temporarily blocks state from requiring religious providers to counsel patients on medical aid in dying.
By Catholics for Catholics
The attorney who represents four orders of Catholic nuns who are challenging New York’s assisted suicide law says the case goes far beyond end-of-life care, contending it will put to the test whether the government can compel religious ministries to function against their beliefs.
In an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital, Adèle Keim, Becket’s senior counsel said a recent federal court ruling provisionally protecting the nuns from complying with the law, which went into effect Wednesday, maintains their capacity to continue caring for elderly patients according to their Catholic faith while the legal challenge advances.
“If you care about freedom, you should care about this case, because if the government can force its way into a home that’s been owned and operated by a group of Catholic nuns for 150 years and order the nuns around and tell them what they can do, there’s nothing that that government’s not going to try to force its way into,” Keim told Fox News Digital in an interview Wednesday.
“There’s nothing that the government isn’t going to try to force people to do,” Keim said. “So, if you care about freedom, you should care about what the state can do in this case.”
For now, a federal judge decided July 30 that orders of nuns will not be obliged under state law to counsel medically assisted suicide to their patients while their case is litigated.
A coalition of religious sisters in New York state won a major victory in federal court last week when the state agreed not to force the sisters to participate in New York’s looming assisted suicide regime. The lawsuit had been brought earlier in July by four communities of… pic.twitter.com/xUlo32iu19
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Filed on July 17 in federal court by over 10 Catholic plaintiffs, the lawsuit includes the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, the Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm, the Little Sisters of the Poor, the Diocese of Rockville Centre and Catholic Health. They argue that New York’s Medical Aid in Dying Act forces religious healthcare providers to advise terminally ill patients about physician-assisted suicide, make referrals to participating providers and, in some cases, accommodate assisted suicide in their facilities.
“New York just passed a law legalizing assisted suicide, and it told providers in the state, ‘Hey, you have to counsel your patients about the benefits of assisted suicide, and you have to help hook them up with a provider who can provide assisted suicide to them if you’re not going to do it yourself,’” Keim said.
“The nuns came into court and said, ‘We can’t do that,’ two weeks ago, and a federal court ruled that they don’t have to while their case proceeds,” she added.
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