Gov. JB Pritzker 'could have gone either way' on Illinois' new right-to-die law

Testimony from terminally ill residents persuaded an undecided Gov. JB Pritzker to sign legislation that will give people with six months or less to live the option to end their lives with a doctor’s prescription in Illinois.

“I could have gone either way on this, just on the issue of compassion, about thinking about what the right thing to do is,” Pritzker said Monday in his first public appearance since signing the polarizing law Friday. “It's very difficult, but in the end, I felt like giving people a choice in these very limited circumstances.

“We don't want to broaden this and make this something that's broad-based available to people who just decide on their own. This is something, deciding when you're in pain and at the end of your life, I just felt in the end that the stories that I heard, the introspection that I did about what I would think for myself or for my family member — that helped to guide me to the conclusion,” Pritzker said during an unrelated Springfield press conference.

The medical aid-in-dying law passed the Illinois House by a narrow margin in May and the state Senate by a bare-minimum majority in October, with staunch opposition from Catholic leaders and disability rights activists.

When it goes into effect next September, adults will be able to request a fatal medication if they’ve been diagnosed by two physicians with an illness that will result in death within six months.

Patients will have to make a series of oral and written requests themselves with witnesses attesting. Physicians will have to confirm the patient is “of sound mind,” and inform them of other end-of-life options like hospice.

And if prescribed a life-ending drug, patients would administer it themselves; health care providers aren’t required to participate.

Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich and other leaders of the Catholic Conference of Illinois claimed the measure will serve “not as a balm for the dying but as a societally acceptable alternative to living.”

Advocates at Access Living warned that for people with disabilities, it could create “subtle but dangerous pressure to end our lives rather than get the care we need.”

Pritzker said he heard from “a lot of people on both sides of this. I will say, I think the vast majority of people… seem to have favored giving people who are in the end of their life a choice. And that is what this bill is about — it's about giving people their individual choice.

“But I also understand that for some people it's part of a religious, moral issue around their faith, and I listen to that because I know how important that is,” Pritzker said. “In the end, I particularly heard from people who are in the last six months of their lives, who are suffering. And I also heard from people who have had their relative or friend go through it, and that they've gone through it with them.”

Pritzker said the subject of aid-in-dying came up only in passing during his brief meeting with Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV last month.

“It was literally in a list of things that we were both dismissing as things that we could imagine that we might disagree about, being from two different religions or having different upbringings.”