Action Needed: Oppose Illinois Assisted Suicide Today!

 

May 27, 2025 | by Amber Smock

Access Living friends and allies,  

We need your help to stop a last-minute attempt to pass physician assisted suicide (PAS) legislation in Illinois. This is the final week of the Illinois legislature’s spring session. In a striking development, assisted suicide supporters have taken the language of their main bill, SB 9, and added it as an amendment to another bill SB 1950. SB 1950 is actually a bill about food safety that has already passed the Senate. If SB 1950 is passed in the House with the assisted suicide amendment (known as HFA2), then all that would need to happen is a simple concurrence vote to pass the bill. 

This is a last-ditch rush job maneuver to keep assisted suicide moving in Illinois, but the stakes are life and death. SB 1950 HFA 2 claims to be “medical aid in dying” (MAID), and proponents claim the bill is about offering a “choice” to die. But as many people with disabilities know, you can’t choose what you don’t have access to. If you can’t get hospice, pain relief, mental health care, or support to live at home — PAS is not a choice. It’s a shortcut. A system that denies care, ignores suffering, and then offers a prescription to die is broken. You can’t call it a choice if people don’t have another way to manage pain or live with dignity. 

 Whose lives are at risk with PAS? The people who can least afford healthcare. In Oregon, 78% of people who used physician-assisted suicide in 2023 were covered by Medicare, Medicaid, or other public insurance. (Oregon Health Authority, 2023) That means most PAS users are already older, disabled, or low-income people dependent on government health systems. Proposed federal cuts to Medicaid will only increase the pressure to use PAS—it’s cheaper and quicker than paying for care yourself. You can’t fix healthcare by offering people death instead. 

Is there oversight for PAS? In Oregon, patients were denied coverage for cancer treatment — but told their plans would pay for lethal drugs. SB1950 HFA 2 claims it would stop this — but there’s no way to enforce those protections. Also, the Illinois Department of Public Health would not monitor the use of PAS. There is no system for audits or investigations, and rather, the PAS proposal relies on self-reported data. If no one’s watching, how do we protect people from being coerced, rushed, or misdiagnosed? According to the National Council on Disability, all legal “safeguards” generally have a workaround—which means they are not safeguards at all. 

What’s the bottom line? Until every Illinoisan has real access to healthcare, mental health support, palliative care, and disability services— physician-assisted suicide is not a safe or ethical policy. This is something to be debated and its consequences weighed appropriately – not something to be pushed through at the end of the session in secret. 

What can you do? We need your help to call and e-mail specific Illinois House members TODAY. The following are Illinois State Representatives who are key votes to stopping SB1950. Please call and email these Representatives and ask them to vote NO on SB1950, the new assisted suicide bill. Explain that you are worried the bill would have a negative impact on people with disabilities, which cannot be stopped with their “safeguards”. Ask them to fully investigate this issue with people with disabilities, before committing to a vote. Disabled lives are at risk. 

Illinois State Representatives  

Please share this important info with fellow disability advocates who recognize that PAS puts us all at risk. Thank you for your support.