New York's assisted suicide law, signed by Governor Kathy Hochul back in February, took effect on August 5.
Three weeks later, the New York Times ran a feature that reads like a pitch deck.
Reporter Emma Goldberg called an assisted suicide business a "start-up for better deaths," and never once asked who gets hurt when death becomes a product.
A $12,000 Start-Up for Better Deaths Launches Under New York's Medical Aid in Dying Law
The business Goldberg profiled charges $12,000 for two medical evaluations, a mental health screening, and a prescription combining sedatives, morphine, and a lethal dose of cardiac medication.
The team told the Times it will cover the cost for patients who cannot pay.
Goldberg wrote that New York has "among the strictest regulations" of the 13 states where assisted suicide is legal.
The eligibility rules are narrow: you have to live in New York, a doctor has to sign off that you have six months or less, and a five-day waiting period stands between the prescription and the pill.
Calling that "strict" is the same trick tobacco companies used when they marketed "light" cigarettes.
The Times Let the Hippocratic Oath Question Slide
Goldberg did ask about the Hippocratic oath.
The business's answer: "I don't think we're harming anyone by doing this. I think we're actually being compassionate and relieving suffering."
Prescribing a lethal combination of sedatives, morphine, and cardiac medication for the specific purpose of ending a life is not what "do no harm" used to mean.
The Times printed that answer and moved on.
Disability Rights Advocates Already Warned This Would Happen
Not Dead Yet, the National Council on Independent Living, and the Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled sued to block New York's law before it ever took effect.
Brooklyn Center advocate Sharon Shapiro put it plainly: "When states legalize assisted suicide while simultaneously cutting home care and community-based services, they send a dangerous message: that death is a solution for disability and lack of support."
A federal judge dismissed their lawsuit in July, ruling only that they lacked standing, not that they were wrong.
Patients Rights Action Fund's Matt Vallière has been saying for years what the Times would not print: "These laws never get more careful. They always expand."
Catholic Hospitals Already Won the Right to Say No
Four religious orders of nuns and the Diocese of Rockville Centre secured a federal injunction days before the law took effect.
Their facilities do not have to participate in assisted suicide while their own lawsuit continues.
Bishop John Barres said the ruling keeps Catholic hospitals "free to serve every patient according to the Gospel."
That is one door the assisted suicide industry cannot force open, at least for now.
Canada's Assisted Suicide Deaths Already Show Where This Law Is Headed
One in every twenty deaths in Canada is now a medically assisted death.
Canada officially passed 100,000 total assisted deaths in April, more than twice the number of Canadians who died in all of World War II.
A 45-year-old Ontario man with Crohn's disease and a history of mental illness was evaluated for an assisted death outside a Tim Hortons.
Dr. James MacLean then drove him to an industrial facility and administered the lethal drugs.
MacLean is now under investigation for improper conduct in at least one other case, including a patient who resumed breathing after being pronounced dead.
New York's law started with terminal cancer patients and six-month prognoses.
Every assisted suicide law that came before it started the same way.
Analysis: This Is a Business Model, and the Times Just Wrote Its Ad Copy
Call it what it is.
A company is charging dying New Yorkers $12,000 to help them die, and the paper of record covered it the way it would cover a meal-kit delivery service.
Palliative care physicians and hospice workers spend their careers trying to make a patient's remaining months bearable.
This company spends five days on paperwork and then hands over the drugs.
California Catholic Conference spokeswoman Molly Sheahan named the actual alternative the Times skipped over: "palliative care, supportive hospice care, spiritual care."
That is what compassion for a dying patient actually looks like.
New York's disability advocates and Catholic hospitals are still fighting this law in court, and Canada is sitting there as proof of exactly where it leads if nobody stops it.
The next time the Times calls a death business a start-up, remember what that word usually means: something built to grow.
Sources:
- Alex Schadenberg, "New York Times Promotes Assisted Suicide," LifeNews.com, September 4, 2026.
- Emma Goldberg, feature on a New York assisted-suicide start-up, The New York Times, September 3, 2026.
- Staff, "Disability Groups File Federal Lawsuits in New York and Illinois Challenging Assisted Suicide Laws," PR Newswire, 2026.
- Staff, "'Care — Not Suicide': Catholics and Advocates Push Back as New York MAID Law Takes Effect," OSV News, 2026.
- Staff, "Catholic Groups Win Injunction in Right-to-Die Law Case as Another Lawsuit Is Dismissed," WSHU, July 31, 2026.
- Staff, "A Nightmare MAID in Canada," The Daily Signal, May 31, 2026.
- Staff, "10 Years, 100,000 Deaths: How Canada Became the Euthanasia Capital of the World," EWTN News, 2026.
