On December 12, 2025, Illinois governor JB Pritzker passed “Deb’s Law,” also known as SB1950, or the “medical aid in dying bill.” For anyone who has been through the harrowing experience of watching a loved one with a terminal illness suffer in their final months, the passing of the bill came as an affirmation that their loved ones deserved a kinder death. For those living with chronic illness and disabilities in an age where medicaid cuts loom and COVID precautions have been entirely tossed to the wayside, the bill has inspired deeper conversation around disposability.
What is Medical Aid in Dying?
Medical aid in dying (MAID) is also known as “death with dignity,” and “medically assisted suicide.” MAID is a practice in which a physician provides a competent adult with a terminal illness with a prescription for a lethal dose of a drug at the request of the patient, which the patient intends to use to end his or her life (National Institute of Health). Illinois is the 12th state to legalize it. The United States MAID movement began sometime in the late 1960s and mid 1970s, first in 1967 when a “right to die” bill was introduced in Florida legislature but failed quickly. In 1975, an Oregon man named Derek Humphrey helped his wife, who was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer, end her life, and 5 years later began The Hemlock Society, an end-of-life organization for people suffering from terminal illness.
When the AIDS epidemic exploded and the government turned their backs on thousands of suffering people, AIDS patients and their loved ones drummed up a fight for the right to die on their own terms. The first MAID bill was passed in Oregon in 1997, 16 years after AIDS was initially declared an epidemic— too late for many AIDS patients who died while facing many forms of discrimination due to their illness.
As the new millennium began, so did more nuanced conversations about the realities of death, terminal illness, and medical aid in dying. In 2006, medical associations such as The American Women’s Medical Association, the American Public Health Association and The American Medical Students’ Association began adopting policies that supported medical aid in dying (Compassion and Choices). In 2010, New York State passed the Palliative Care Information Act, which required healthcare workers to give legal information on a patient’s rights regarding end-of-life choices and care. This requirement is a facet of the newly passed Deb’s Law in Illinois.
What will Deb’s Law do?
In Illinois, medical aid in dying will be legally regulated like this:
Qualifying patients are terminally ill, mentally capable adults with a prognosis of less than 6 months to live.
Qualifying patients must submit 2 requests at least 5 days apart, as well as a separate, written request in order to be approved.
Qualifying patients must receive 2 separate physician assessments and mandatory counseling on all end of life care options.
Patients must be able to self-administer the medication.
Physicians are legally required to inform patients about all end of life care options (including hospice, palliative care, comfort care, and pain control)
Healthcare providers can refer an individual requesting medication for a mental health assessment to ensure a person’s capacity to make an informed decision.
Life insurance cannot deny a family’s request for payout based on use of this medication.
Forging or coercing a person to make a request for MAID medication becomes a felony.
Individuals can withdraw their request for medication at anytime and decide not to take the meds. The medication will then be properly disposed of according to state and federal laws.
Deb’s Law will go into effect on September 12, 2026.
(Source: ACLU)
What does this mean for people dealing with terminal illnesses?
For terminally ill people and their loved ones, this law provides an additional end of life option. MAID medication will be much easier to use than VSED, or Voluntary Stopping of Eating and Drinking, which is fully legal in the US and, as the name implies, involves the dying person choosing to end their own life through refusing all food and water, effectively ending the person’s life through dehydration with 1-3 weeks. VSED is a common practice within hospice care settings. Of course, the ease of use for MAID medication use relies on a patient’s ability to fulfill all requirements to access the medication.
The language around mental capacity and mental health within the bill suggests that there are well-intended safe guards that could leave people with cognitive disabilities, severe mental health struggles, and people who cannot use their hands to write the request out as required by law limited in their ability to access such medication. Little definition of “written" request” is given, so it is unclear if this request must be handwritten or can be typed.
Deb’s Law puts onus onto healthcare providers to provide accurate, detailed, and all-encompassing information on end-of-life care options and protects people who use the medication from legal and insurance-related repercussions. These aspects of the bill are important, especially as the country takes a swing towards right wing extremism with an angry and increasingly powerful “pro-life” movement which contends that efforts to intervene with things such as painful natural deaths and unwanted or medically unsafe pregnancies are effectively murder. Look up the tragic case of Adriana Smith, a Black woman who was declared “medically brain dead” at 9 weeks pregnant, and then was put on life support and forced to carry a fetus to full term, to see how right wing extremism has intertwined itself to regulate how and when people are allowed to die.
What Does This Mean as the USA Slashes Medicaid and Ignores COVID?
Imani Barbarin, a disability justice advocate and content creator, put out a very foreboding take in December 2020 about medical aid in dying, tweeting “With a massive influx of disabled people from COVID, we’re going to see a huge influx of assisted suicide programs and legislation because the system barely worked ahead of the pandemic.” Five years later, I fear that she may have been seeing the future a little too well.
When the One Beautiful Big Bill Act (OBBBA) was passed on July 4, 2025, medicaid funding was effectively reduced by $1 trillion dollars, or 15% of the total budget. This will leave over 11.8 million people without health insurance directly through medicaid, and result in over 3.1 million people losing their medicaid insurance through the marketplace (American Psychological Association). At the same time, the COVID pandemic is raging into its sixth year, with US cases being reported at astronomical levels in 2025 compared to 2020, 2021, and even 2022 (World Health Organzation). Public health measures to prevent COVID have been tossed to the wayside, and a disease with frightening longterm effects such as lung damage, cardiovascular damage, and neurological damage has been seriously downplayed by world leaders.
So, what does medical aid in dying mean as the USA slashes medicaid and ignores COVID? It means we must have nuance in our reception of this law and how we discuss it. As Imani Barbarin points out in her tweet, the healthcare system barely worked for most people, especially disabled people, even before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Necropolitics, or the politics of who lives and who dies, has allowed us to largely normalize the death of disabled people, especially when people say things like “it only impacts the most vulnerable” when confronted with the dangers of contracting COVID.
The reality is that we all become “vulnerable” as we live and age. Whether it is due to the being lucky enough to live into old age as bones weaken and organ functions slow down, or the unfortunate reality that some of us will become terminally ill, “vulnerability” comes for all of us, and many of us love “vulnerable” people. COVID can cause increased health risks for people with spinal cord injuries, cancer, dementia, HIV, and it can cause strokes, heart attacks, and myalgic encephalomyelitis (Center for Disease Control). As of today, the World Health Organization reports 1.2 million COVID-related deaths in the US between the start of the pandemic in December 2019 through December 2025. And these are just deaths directly caused by COVID— it is likely impossible to account for the ways that COVID has exacerbated health conditions to cut countless lives short.
As we begin to celebrate the humane decision to allow terminally ill people more agency in how they live and die, we must stay vigilant in how we sustain lives the often regarded as disposable. For disabled people and those who have had their health irrevocably damaged by COVID, this new law serves as a reminder that death might soon become more accessible than adequate healthcare. This is an unacceptable possibility and something we must fight against. Just as anyone deserves the dignity to medically end their life in order to avoid painful suffering under terminal illness, everyone, especially disabled people, deserve the dignity to live in a world that values accessible and affordable healthcare and strong public health measures to prevent unnecessary and unjust deaths.
