The New York state capitol in Albany. / Credit: Nina Alizada/Shutterstock
CNA Staff, Jun 10, 2025 / 11:34 am (CNA).
The Catholic bishops in New York state are warning of a looming “nightmare” there after the state Legislature passed a measure authorizing doctors to participate in assisted suicide.
Democrats in the state Senate voted Monday to pass the “Medical Aid in Dying Act,” a measure that will allow doctors to prescribe medication to terminally ill individuals that the patients may “self-administer to bring about death.”
The measure limits the suicide option to those 18 years or older with “an incurable and irreversible illness or condition that has been medically confirmed.” The legislation is expected to be signed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul.
‘A dark day for New York state’
New York joins 11 other states — California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, Maine, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington — as well as the District of Columbia in allowing patients to take their own lives via a doctor’s prescription.
Dennis Poust, the executive director of the state Catholic conference, said on Monday that the bill’s passage marked “a dark day for New York state.”
Poust urged the governor to recognize that the law “would be catastrophic for medically underserved communities, including communities of color, as well as for people with disabilities and other vulnerable populations.”
He noted that Hochul has worked to address suicide in the state but that the assisted suicide measure “undermines those priorities.”
“The legislation passed in the Senate and Assembly contains no requirement for a psychological screening for depression or other mental illness, and not even so much as a brief waiting period for people who might be in despair following a terminal diagnosis,” he noted.
Poust said the Catholic conference called on the government to “expand palliative and hospice care, mental health services, and family caregiver support” rather than allow legalized doctor-assisted suicide.
Church leaders in the state have repeatedly spoken out against assisted suicide during the Legislature’s consideration of the measure. Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York, last month called the proposal “a disaster waiting to happen” and a “terrible idea” that “turns everything society knows and believes about medicine on its head.”
The state Catholic conference urged voters last year to voice their opposition to the measure, calling the proposal “another assault on human life here” and “dangerous for patients, caregivers, and vulnerable populations.”
Delaware is the most recent state to legalize assisted suicide. Last month state Gov. Matt Meyer signed a bill legalizing physician-assisted suicide for terminally ill adults with a prognosis of six months or less to live.
Earlier this month, on the other hand, a bill to legalize physician-assisted suicide in Illinois was not called for a vote in the Senate before the Legislature adjourned on June 1, effectively halting its progress for the session amid ardent opposition from leading Catholic voices in the state.
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An aerial view of the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., May 11, 2021. / Credit: Air Force Staff Sgt. Brittany A. Chase, DOD, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Dec 10, 2024 / 06:00 am (CNA).
Democratic lawmakers on Capito… […]
Schoolchildren in Tigray, Ethiopia, eat biscuits and tea provided by Mary’s Meals. / Copyright Mary’s Meals
St. Louis, Mo., Sep 3, 2023 / 05:00 am (CNA).
A Catholic charity providing thousands of free meals daily to schoolchildren in Tigray, northern Ethiopia, recently resumed operations after a brutal civil war precluded it from its mission for almost three years.
Since 2017, Mary’s Meals has worked with the Daughters of Charity in Tigray to bring food to schoolchildren there. Pre-2020 they fed an estimated 24,000 children a day, but the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent commencement of the country’s devastating civil war halted the program. Mary’s Meals had every intention of reopening in the fall of 2020 following COVID, but the start of the conflict precluded those plans.
“It was really heartbreaking to see that what we were expecting to be quite a joyous occasion in terms of the resumption of school feeding, children being welcomed back into schools and being able to return to what must have felt a bit more like normal life, suddenly being decimated by this terrible conflict,” Alex Keay, director of programs at Mary’s Meals International, told CNA.
Schoolchildren in Tigray, Ethiopia, eat biscuits and tea provided by Mary’s Meals. Copyright Mary’s Meals
Today, as of late August, Mary’s Meals is able to serve high-energy biscuits and hot tea to approximately 10,000 children in 14 schools. Over the next few months, the group says, its program and menu will be expanded as cooking facilities that were destroyed or looted in the fighting are replaced.
Keay called the resumption of the food distribution a “joyous occasion.”
“We’ve been able to restart school feeding just in the last couple of weeks. And more of those schools will be reopening and we will be able to get food to those schools, and we would like to be able to reach even more schools. We know the need is there,” Keay said, speaking from Mary’s Meals’ home country of Scotland.
“These school meals that we’re providing are a critical lifeline at this time, but also they are enabling the children to return to school after more than a three-year absence.”
A refugee camp in Tigray, Ethiopia. Copyright Mary’s Meals
Widespread starvation has been reported recently in Tigray, especially since U.N. and U.S. food aid has been disrupted in recent months due to revelations of corruption. Overall, more than 20 million people in Ethiopia rely on food assistance. A persistent drought has made food scarcity even worse. According to reports from the region, many mothers giving birth at local hospitals in Tigray have been unable to breastfeed due to their own hunger, and many malnourished children “near death” have been showing up at hospitals.
It is estimated that 600,000 people have died in the conflict and there are reports of ongoing violence in various parts of Tigray. Though Ethiopia is extremely diverse overall, the Tigray region is overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian, at about 96%.
Keay said Mary’s Meals is focused on providing nourishing meals for children in areas where access to education is limited. The logistics are challenging, and the on-the-ground help of the Daughters of Charity is vital, he said.
“They would sooner give away the food in their cupboard than have people come to their door hungry with nothing,” Keay said of the religious sisters.
“Our model is a low-cost model, but I think a very efficient model whereby the community is taking a strong ownership and a really strong part in making sure that those programs operate successfully,” he added. “So they’ll be the ones that manage the local preparation of the meals, they’ll organize the volunteer cooks to come every day to cook the food and to make sure that every child that comes to that school gets fed. And then our role is that we’ll provide the food, the training, the monitoring, and the support to those communities so that that food is in the right place at the right time and that the children will all be fed.”
Schoolchildren in Tigray, Ethiopia, eat biscuits and tea provided by Mary’s Meals. Copyright Mary’s Meals
Schools provide a “beacon of hope” in an otherwise hope-starved country, and providing free meals at the schools helps to provide an incentive for students to get educated, he said. Major challenges remain, though, as many of the schools themselves have been shelled and looted amid the conflict.
“The children came with a lot of energy and a lot of passion for education, a lot of determination to really engage in their schools and to try and get the best from their education. And we certainly see that in terms of the … high attendance rates … once school feeding had started. That’s not uncommon for us to see that all of a sudden more children are encouraged to go to school,” Keay continued, drawing on his own experience visiting the country this year.
“The amazing thing is that the children were already coming back to those schools even though there was no furniture to sit on. Many of the teachers are still not back in their posts. A lot of the classrooms are actually damaged, the walls are damaged, or there’s holes in the ceiling. But the children are already coming back to those schools and are really, I guess, leading by example in their communities in terms of trying to get the schools back up and running.”
A destroyed school building in Tigray, Ethiopia. Copyright Mary’s Meals
The conflict in Tigray stemmed in part from the outsized role the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the primary political party representing the region, has played in recent decades in national politics in Ethiopia despite Tigrayans’ status as an ethnic minority. The political coalition that the TPLF led was dissolved in 2018 by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed after he took office. The coalition’s ethnicity-based regional parties were merged into a single party, the Prosperity Party, which the TPLF refused to join. Tigrayan leaders have said they were unfairly targeted by political purges and allegations of corruption.
On Nov. 4, 2020, Abiy announced a military offensive in response to an alleged attack on a military base in Mekelle, the capital of Tigray. The conflict soon escalated into an all-out civil war in which mass atrocities have been reported. Eritrea, Ethiopia’s neighbor to the north and former adversary, joined the side of the Ethiopian government early in the conflict. Some have accused Abiy’s government of ethnic cleansing.
For much of the war, Tigray was under blockade by the Ethiopian government, which halted all humanitarian aid and forbade aid workers and media from entering the region. The Ethiopian government and the TPLF signed a peace deal brokered by the African Union (AU) in November 2022, bringing the war to an end on paper.
A damaged school building in Tigray, Ethiopia. Copyright Mary’s Meals
The needs in Tigray over the past few years have been largely overshadowed by other major world events, such as the war in Ukraine. Keay said it is important that people take notice of the “huge, devastating humanitarian situation” in Tigray.
“Tigray is a place that for the most part, people will be familiar with for probably quite negative reasons. There’s been terrible famines in that part of Africa, and a lot of those images, I think, have stuck in a lot of people’s minds. But it’s a very beautiful part of the world, with a real strong sense of identity and culture for the Tigrian people. They’re very distinctive in their culture, the way people dress. And there’s been a lot of work in that part of Ethiopia in recent years around development, and really a lot of progress has been made,” Keay said.
The brutal war, Keay said, has “really set back the development that’s been happening in Tigray.”
“From a state that was really blossoming and a lot of really positive things were happening in terms of sustainable food being grown for the communities … to a situation where the vast majority of Tigrayans are now dependent on food, hand out food aid to be able to survive. And it’s going to take a long time, I think, to repair that damage.”
Schoolchildren in Tigray, Ethiopia, eat biscuits and tea provided by Mary’s Meals. Copyright Mary’s Meals
The BBC reported earlier this month that at least 1,400 people have starved to death in Tigray since food assistance from the U.N.’s World Food Programme (WFP), the global humanitarian organization addressing food security, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was suspended about four months ago. The suspension came about after it was revealed by Tigrayan authorities that nearly 500 people had been stealing the food, including government officials and nongovernmental organization staff.
Keay said that from an accountability standpoint, the Daughters of Charity have developed a very “transparent and accountable system that meant that the food was being put directly into [needy people’s] hands.”
“Other organizations were having to suspend their programs because of concerns about food not getting to those that it was intended to. But it was very clear when we were there and being on the ground, seeing the food being distributed, that it is really possible to be able to put the food directly into the hands of those that we’re trying to serve,” he noted.
Mary’s Meals now operates in 18 countries, after its founding in Malawi in 2002. Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, a Catholic and founder and CEO of Mary’s Meals, was declared a “CNN Hero” in 2010 and has also been awarded the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth for his work. The organization says it feeds 2.4 million children every day throughout the 18 countries where it is present, with the largest share of those children in Malawi.
Pope Francis has repeatedly called for peace in Tigray. In 2021, after his weekly Angelus, the pope prayed a Hail Mary for the people of the Tigray region.
Richmond, Va., May 8, 2019 / 03:58 pm (CNA).- A federal judge in Richmond, Virginia has ruled against state medical regulations requiring first-trimester abortions be performed only by physicians.
“After a careful review of the experts’ opinions from both sides, a consensus appears to have evolved that first trimester abortions, which typically require only medication, do not require the onsite presence of a licensed physician and is consequently unduly burdensome,” wrote U.S. District Judge Henry E. Hudson on May 6.
Nearly a dozen lawsuits filed in states across the U.S. are seeking to allow medical professionals other than doctors – such as nurse practitioners, midwives and physician assistants – to perform abortions.
Planned Parenthood affiliates and abortion rights lobbying groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have filed 11 lawsuits across the United States since 2016, beginning after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down health and safety regulations on abortion providers in Texas.
The judge has yet to set a date for when the Virginia ruling will take effect. Pro-life advocates decried the decision, saying the ruling demostrated a disregard for the safety of women who choose to have abortions.
“Laws requiring that ‘physicians only’ perform abortions exist in 40 states. The court decision today in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia is directly contrary to controlling U.S. Supreme Court precedent,” said Olivia Gans Turner, president of Virginia’s National Right to Life state affiliate.
“In their unceasing quest to promote no-limits destruction of unborn children regardless of stage of development or ability to feel pain, abortion advocates are more extreme even than the Roe v. Wade decision they claim to defend.”
The Center for Reproductive Rights, an abortion rights group, is challenging similar laws in Mississippi, Arizona, Kansas, Montana and Louisiana, the Washington Post reports.
A trial is set for May 20 on Virginia state requirements that all second-trimester abortions be performed in a hospital; that patients wait 24 hours after getting an ultrasound to undergo an abortion; as well as licensing standards for clinics, the Post reports.
The Maine chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood in Sept. 2017 filed a lawsuit in federal court, taking issue with a state law that only permits doctors to perform abortions. Democratic Gov. Janet Mills has also introduced legislation that would allow nurse practitioners, physician assistants and certified nurse-midwives to perform abortions.
Clarke Forsythe, senior counsel at Americans United for Life, told CNA in 2017 that requiring only doctors to perform abortions “establishes a high standard of safety for patient care.” Allowing non-doctors to perform abortions would “further isolate abortions from other gynecological care,” he told CNA.
According to Forsythe, the number of doctors who perform abortions has continued to shrink.
“Doctors don’t want to get into the business,” he said. “The abortion industry and population controllers have been desperately looking to increase the number of abortionists.”
Suzanne Lafreniere, director of public policy for Diocese of Portland in Maine, described the lawsuit as “a desperate attempt to increase abortions in the state of Maine.”
She said that the number of surgical abortions has been declining in Maine, and that the abortion lobby is doing “everything it can to increase its business, to be perfectly honest.”
Yesterday, the Maine House of Representatives passed a bill that would require Maine’s Medicaid program and private insurance companies to pay for elective abortions. The bill now moves to the state Senate. Fifteen other states already spend public money on abortion— Maine’s Medicaid already covers abortions in cases of rape or risk to the mother’s life.
Last month, the Montana Supreme Court upheld a ruling allowing a nurse practitioner and a nurse midwife to continue to perform abortions in the early stages of pregnancy, until the court makes a final decision on whether a state law excluding nurses from performing abortions is constitutional.
Physician-assisted, i.e. physician-complicit.