Credit: Getty Images.

Gov. Kathy Hochul has said that after the state Legislature adds a few more agreed-to safeguards to legislation passed last year, she will sign the Medical Aid In Dying Act by the end of this month.

If so, the law will take effect in July and New York will become the 13th state, plus the District of Columbia, with an aid-in-dying law. New York’s will be the most stringent, tightly regulated in the nation, as it should be.

Advertisement

Article continues below this ad

This is an enormous and impressive achievement for the state, both symbolically and actually.

For me, as for the governor, this is personal as well as a much-needed compassionate adjustment to public policy, one that the vast majority of New Yorkers favors regardless of ethnic or religious background. Gov. Hochul has described how her advocacy was shaped by watching her mother die a prolonged, dehumanizing and painful exit from ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. A tortured passing that made a mockery of the sanctity of life.

This is an experience common to many of us, directly or indirectly. There are good deaths, bad deaths and dreadful ones all around us.

I was 19 in July of 1961, sitting next to my trembling, haggard mother, in our tiny kitchen along a very rural........

© Times Union