The Gift of Compassion

These words from New York State Governor Kathy Hochul struck me:

“I do not believe that in every instance condemning someone to excruciating pain and suffering preserves the dignity and sanctity of life.”

Brave and compassionate words from a Roman Catholic governor facing intense pressure from bishops of the church and from disability groups to reject New York’s Medical Aid in Dying Act. Hochul wrote them in an essay last week announcing she will sign the MAID bill in January, giving 20 million New Yorkers access to a peaceful death.

The state’s Catholic Conference denounced her decision as “egregious” and an “abandonment of its most vulnerable citizens”, according to the New York Times, comments in line with the Vatican which has called MAID “intrinsically evil”.

Hochul was brave because she listened to people suffering, and she looked into her own heart. She considered her experience watching her own mother die painfully from ALS, and she contemplated the teachings of her own religious faith.

“I was taught that God is merciful and compassionate, and so must we be,” she wrote.

I applaud Hochul. I thank her for her honesty. Her essay, published in the Albany Times Union, is worth reading in full. It is a model of grace.

Compassion is a quality too rarely found in these difficult times. Driven by ideological fervor, too often on both left and right we block out differing views. We refuse to listen, and in doing so, we refuse to grow emotionally and intellectually, and to learn. We refuse to respect different experiences as valid or worthy of consideration. We decline space, as if there is only one path forward in this diverse and beautiful world. I need not recount the cancellations of the past year (reproductive rights, gender identity, immigration status, religious belief …). They seem to multiply daily.

What surprises me in this tumult is the moral rectitude brought to bear in the denial of individual freedoms, as if personal autonomy for those of differing views is a sin that must be rubbed out, a refusal of the sphere where people are free to make their own decisions about how to lead their lives in areas that do not impinge upon the rights of others, a refusal because those decisions do not comport with others’ beliefs. I had thought that individual liberty was at the heart of the American experiment. I thought this was a settled political theory, accepted as an integral part of a well-functioning liberal democracy. I was wrong. Instead, a new moral authority is attempting to force its standards upon me.

Which brings me back to compassion, love and respect. What higher qualities can we ask of each other? Surely, exercising these values lies at the heart of a moral life and outstrips any moral preachings?

Progress

I celebrate that in one area we are seeing such an exercise gain ground. Over the past decade, as more and more people have spoken out about the agony of viscous diseases stealing loved ones and their powerlessness to end their pain, we have seen an extraordinary expansion in the right to choose medical aid in dying as a way to shorten extreme suffering. It is an option, not a compulsion, and it has very specific guardrails against the abuse rightly feared by opponents.

Governor Hochul’s decision, one she called the most difficult of her career, was exercised after careful listening and showing respect for the views on both sides. Her signature, along with the Governor JB Pritzker’s signing the Illinois End of Life Options for Terminally Ill Patients Act last week, means that over 100 million Americans, fully one third of the population, will have legal access to medical aid in dying in 2026. What an advance from a decade ago, when I began on this journey as my wife Mary was dying of ovarian cancer, when only five states covering less than six percent of the population allowed MAID. What a gift of peace Mary has left in Washington, DC, and others are leaving for their states.

So in this holiday season, may we join together and celebrate compassion, love, and respect in all their diverse forms as sacred gifts to share. Life is too short to do otherwise.